


The Mad Road

by bellatemple



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 22:04:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 45,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On October 31st, 2005, Sam Winchester wakes up to find someone rummaging through his kitchen. It's his father, with bad news: his brother's dead, and the thing that killed him is coming to Palo Alto. Weeks later, Jo Harvelle follows a lead on her missing boyfriend to a mental health facility and meets a man, dressed in half-scrubs, half-flannel, with bandaged wrists and paranoid tendencies. His name is Dean Winchester, he knows more than he possibly could, and convincing his family he's not really dead would only be half their problem -- if Jo can help him find them. . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: One scene of Sam/Ruby and some unrequited Dean/Jo (not the focus of the story). Character death (off-screen, listed in summary), possession, mental illness, themes of suicide and involuntary drug use, one scene of non-explicit sexual activity with dubious consent (due to possession) and knifeplay. Also, time travel.  
> Spoilers through "Dark Side of the Moon"

_There's your Karma ripe as peaches._  
\-- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (1965)

 **THE MAD ROAD**

 ** **PROLOGUE****

A scream ripped through the night, even over the shrill whine of the fire alarms. John watched helplessly as smoke poured through his lips into the cool night air, not regaining full control of his limbs until the last wisp of it passed to board the freight train to Hell. When he could breathe again, it was like trying to suck fire through a crumpled straw. His knees wobbled, threatening to send him toppling to the asphalt, were it not for the firm grip of Bobby's hand on his upper arm.

Bobby's other hand clutched a flask and that, coupled with the searing heat he could feel press against his back, sent renewed energy into his limbs.

 _Dean._

He could still see his boy's eyes staring down on him, wide with pain and betrayal, as he slid up the wall towards the ceiling. Could practically hear Dean begging, his son certain to the last that John wouldn't let him die, even as the demon wearing John's body ripped a hole through Dean's stomach while John helplessly watched.

 _No._

" _Dean!_ "

John spun in place as Bobby cursed, losing the flask in favor of wrapping both his arms around John's waist in a bear hug. John twisted to get free, eyes glued to the hellish scene playing out in front of him.

The motel was on fire. The flames licked their way down the motel's length towards the offices on the other side. John didn't care. The whole thing could burn to the ground -- maybe should -- and it wouldn't matter.

The only thing that mattered to him right now was already in the decimated room on the end.

He twisted harder, throwing elbows and feet at Bobby's frame in an effort to get free, memories of another building in another town and another decade dancing into the growing flames. " _No!_ "

It was only when Bobby managed to wrestle him to his knees that John registered the other man was speaking -- screaming, in fact -- in his ear. "John, you can't. I'm sorry. It's too late, John. John, you listening to me? John!"

John shook, his body reacting in ways he'd long since trained it not to. He'd spent years practicing calm in the face of such sights as the one in front of him, but no amount of training or drilling could prepare him for this. He continued to struggle forward, dragging Bobby along with him. He had to get back into that room. There could be a chance Dean was alive. He might still be waiting for John to come pull him out.

He couldn't let his son down again.

"Let me go. I can save him." The smoke from the fire burned his throat, already raw from the exiting demon. It tasted foul, acrid and sour, but John refused to flinch. He was close. He could still get to Dean. "I can save him."

Bobby wrenched them both around, away from the fire, dodging John's wildly flung fist as he shoved him face first into the ground. "You try and you'll get yourself killed, dammit. That ain't gonna do no one any good!"

John's breath heaved. He tasted salt and sulfur, blood and ash and asphalt on his lips, and he groaned. "I don't care. I don't --"

" _He_ would." Bobby sat on him -- actually sat down on John's lower back, forcing a single, hysterical laugh through John's lips, making him sag further into the parking lot. He squeezed his eyes shut.

"Dean."

The sigh Bobby let out then was as heavy as the man himself. "I know, John. I saw."

He had, too. He'd come bursting in the motel room door like the whole damn First Cavalry come to the rescue. John shied away from the flash of memory, trying desperately not to picture what he'd seen next: Dean, flattened to the ceiling, face gray and stomach red even against the orange and white flame swallowing the room around him.

Stupid. Goddamn rookie stupid was what it was, going out and getting himself possessed and letting the demon bring him home, back to Dean. Twenty-two years of hunting, of keeping his boys safe --

Oh god.

"Sam," he said, barely able to get the breath to fuel the word past Bobby's weight on his back. Bobby shifted, and John took immediate advantage, throwing himself upward and sideways to roll out from beneath him. Bobby landed on his ass on the asphalt, red faced and swearing.

The roof over the burning rooms collapsed, sending a shower of sparks into the air and down onto the parking lot. The air stank of roasting meat, and John felt bile rise in his throat. He swallowed it down along with his grief, letting every ounce of protective rage he'd built over the years swarm up to take its place.

"It wants Sam," he said, pushing himself to legs still shaking faintly in reaction. "It got Dean and now it's going to go after Sam."

Bobby stared, then grit his teeth. " _Hell._ "

John turned his back on the motel, on the thought that Dean could still be miraculously whole within, waiting for him, and set out instead for his truck on the other side of the parking lot.

He'd long since stopped believing in miracles.

Bobby scrambled after him. "Hang on there, John. I'm comin' with you."

John shook his head hard enough to make himself dizzy. He dug into his pocket for the Impala's spare key and jabbed it in Bobby's direction without looking back.

"Take care of her. I'll get Sam, and we'll meet you at yours."

"John --"

John turned then, barely restraining a growl. "Do not argue with me on this, Singer."

Bobby adjusted his hat, staring back, that puzzling, considering gaze that only he and Jim Murphy had ever managed to perfect -- though Lord knew Sam had tried. John held his eyes until Bobby wavered, then jabbed the key at him again. Bobby took it gingerly.

"You damn well better know what you're doing, Winchester."

John snorted, the sound bitter and raw, then turned back to his truck. He caught another glimpse of the fire and had to force himself steady again.

"Yeah," he heard Bobby say behind him. "That's what I thought."

It wasn't until John was pulling out of the parking lot, foot heavier on the truck's gas pedal than it had been in some time, that he caught sight of the two figures in the tall grass by the side of the motel, silhouetted against the flames -- the night manager, maybe, and a friend. Both were men, or at least were man-shaped, and in the rear view mirror he thought he recognized the jacket the smaller one was wearing.

John slammed on the brakes and turned in his seat to look back, certain for just a moment that that had been _Dean_ there, too stubborn to die at the hands of any demon, but the heat of the fire distorted the figures' shapes and the skin on John's face and the backs of his arms itched, a visceral reminder of just _how_ he knew that his son couldn't have survived.

He'd done the same thing with Mary, in those early years, had thought he'd caught a flash of golden hair or a snatch of her laugh around corners and in crowds, only to have it turn out to be a stranger when he got close. When he turned back towards the road and adjusted the mirrors again, the figures had moved on.

He pulled out onto the road, chased by the sounds of firetrucks approaching from the other direction. Bobby would spin them a decent enough story. John just had to get to Palo Alto.

Sam was the only one left. John'd be damned before he let the demon get him, too.


	2. Book One

_In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away,  
my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were   
guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear   
their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed,   
alone and stupid . . ._  
\-- Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1960)

 **BOOK ONE**

 ** **SAM****

Sam woke after midnight to the sound of someone moving around in his kitchen.

That phrase still took getting used to. _His kitchen_. He and Jess rented the apartment at the beginning of the school year but, even two months in, it still seemed surreal to be earning the money to pay for a place he could do most anything with. Like leave dishes in the sink and stock the fridge full of beer. He heard the refrigerator door open. Jess, the only other person who should be rooting through it, lay still asleep beside him.

It'd been a long time since he kept a weapon by the bed and for a moment he cursed himself for it. Of course, in regards to anyone in Palo Alto, he _was_ a weapon. Whoever was in there was in for one hell of a surprise.

Sam figured it might be a drunken fraternity brother on a dare. Maybe a junkie looking for something worth enough to get him a fix. Maybe, just maybe, a professional cat burglar -- though anyone who'd been in the business long enough to qualify as a "professional" should know better than to try to rob a student. He expected to ambush the person in the doorway, maybe scare the crap out of them from a distance.

He didn't expect to stop dead in the doorway, staring into the bright light of the built-in kitchen florescent at his father, hunched at the table with a bottle of Jack Daniels and two red plastic cups.

John looked up the moment Sam got to the doorway. He looked half-dead.

"Had to get those off your neighbors," he said, making no move to indicate what he was talking about. "Would it kill you to do some damn dishes?"

Anger immediately flooded through Sam's system, diluting the shock into trace elements. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"For you and your girl," his father continued, tapping the table between the cups, his refusal to acknowledge Sam's anger only making it burn brighter. "I've had enough of it, tonight."

His girl. John knew about Jess. John wasn't even pretending not to know about her. "Jess has nothing to do with you."

"She'll be along, right?" John leveled a steady look in Sam's direction, showing no sign of the whiskey he claimed to have already drunk.

"She's asleep."

John snorted. "Not for long. You're too smart to shack up with someone who doesn't pay attention to her surroundings."

Sam wanted to deny that. He wanted to swear up and down that his father was wrong as usual, that John didn't know a damn thing about Sam or his life at Stanford and never could, but John's sideways compliment did just what he'd wanted. Sam refused to deny his own intelligence and good sense to his father.

Jess chose that moment to step up behind him in the doorway. "Sam, everything okay?"

Sam didn't turn around. "Jess, go back to bed."

Jess was tall -- "a Sam-sized girl", his sophomore roommate had said -- and although she was barefoot, she only had to stretch and lean a little bit to see around him. John lifted two fingers in a wave.

She must have recognized him from the photo of his parents she'd found when they were unpacking. Given his way, Sam would have kept it tucked away, where he could take it out when he was in the mood for a little self-flagellation, but Jess had insisted that this was his home too, and flea market bits and baubles weren't going to cut it. She gave it a spot of honor on the dresser.

Sam dressed in the dark.

Jess waved back at John, then casually dodged past Sam to make her way into the kitchen. She wrinkled her nose when she saw the plastic cups and glanced back. "If your dad was coming over," she said, "you _really_ should've done the dishes."

If Dean were there, he would've laughed. Speaking of. . . .

"What the hell are you doing here?" Sam asked again, not bothering to try and cover his anger in front of Jessica. He didn't speak much about his family, but when he did, he couldn't keep quiet about how much he hated how his father had raised him. "Where's Dean?"

John shrank back into his chair, a creaky thing too small by half for a man his size. He poured a finger of Jack into each of the cups, then took a decent sized belt himself, straight from the bottle.

The temperature in the room didn't drop. There were no phantasmic touches or chilly breezes. But Sam's sense of foreboding skyrocketed when he saw that bottle tip up. Talk of Dean shouldn't elicit that sort of reaction.

The bottle hit the table again with a too loud *clunk* in the quiet room. John looked to Jess, then up at Sam.

The room tilted.

"No," said Sam.

"I'm sorry," said John.

Jess took half a step back toward Sam, one hand out, just level with the top of her hip, as though she wasn't sure what to do with it. Sam stepped back. He wanted to say "no" again, maybe force a laugh as though his father would ever possibly joke about something like this. He groped for the door frame with his hand, fingers locking around the jam once they located it. "How?"

John cleared his throat. "Fire," he said, his voice suddenly far more hoarse than it had been when he spoke about the dishes.

"No," Sam said again, forcing the word past a welling tightness in his throat. He'd dreamed of Jess -- and those were just dreams. He knew the story of how his mother died, and stress from the LSATs had bled over, transformed his mom into his girlfriend. A kind of twisted catharsis. Dean wasn't even involved. "I'd know."

John's expression shifted again, and this time, Sam recognized the fury and determination he was so used to. "The same thing, Sam. I'm getting closer."

Sam pulled his own anger over his mind like a blanket, trapping everything else underneath. If anything would wake his father up to the danger he put himself and his family in on a daily basis, something happening to Sam or Dean should be it. Especially Dean. Dean was the soldier, the one who stayed. "You don't think you've gotten close enough, yet?!"

John pressed himself to his feet. "It came for Dean, Sam, you don't think it'll keep on coming?!"

"Knock it off!" Jess stood between John and Sam now, where Dean used to stand. She straightened to her full height, her hair loose and wild around her face. Dean would have placated and nothing would have changed. Jess's clear anger and volume cut between father and son like a well-maintained machete, and she didn't pause long enough to lose that advantage. "What the hell are you talking about? What 'it'? Fire doesn't 'come after' people."

Her words hung there, thick in a room suddenly far too full and completely unfamiliar. Sam wanted to fall. He wanted to let his face crumple and to lean into Jess's presence for comfort. His brother was dead. He wanted to cry and shout against it, but he couldn't because his father had used the fact as a goddamn segue into a conversation about Sam's refusal to hunt. And this, too, would just bring another accusation.

"You didn't tell her."

There it was. "No, Dad. It wasn't important."

Sam figured this was where John would take him outside, maybe. Jess would be furious, but he'd have time to ease her into things, or reassure her that it was all just a drunken hallucination or something. Instead, John turned his head to face Jess directly.

"Monsters are real," he said. "One's killed half our family. And I'm going to kill it." He held out one of the red cups. Jess looked to Sam. He could read the accusations of crazy all over her face. John laughed and tossed back the contents of the cup, then moved to refill it. "You can say it out loud, Jessica, I've heard it all. I'm not crazy. I'll even have time to prove it." He looked up from the cup, this time at Sam. "It's coming here, next."

* 

"Tell me about him," said Jess, curling up against Sam's side. He tried to pretend he was asleep, though he knew it wouldn't work. The quiet of the bedroom made it harder to hang onto the denial and anger, made it too easy to turn the thoughts running in his head from fact analysis, _where_ and _why_ and _what now_ , and turn them to _oh god, he must have been terrified_ and _howhowhowhowhowhow. . . ._ and Jess expected him to put all of that -- all of Dean -- into words.

It just wasn't possible.

"Jess, no."

"Please?" She fisted her hand in his night shirt, then flattened it out, rubbing gently over his chest. "I want to know. You've mentioned him before, but." She fisted her hand again. "Was he like him?"

Like his father, she meant. Crazy. Believed in things that went bump in the night. Part of Sam immediately thought ‘yes', that Dean was just like John, just as stubborn, just as driven, and just as thoughtless about the consequences of his actions. But that one word wouldn't be doing it justice. Sam squeezed his eyes closed, trying to fight off the lump building behind his ribs.

He wanted to rewind the whole night and take it all back. He wanted his father gone, back into the ether of possibility, where Sam didn't know if he was alive or dead so Sam could believe that he was fine and everything was normal. That _Dean_ was alive and fine and hunting, or better yet, suspended somehow in stasis, unchanging until such time as Sam felt capable of opening up the box that held Dean and Dad and all his life to date.

"He --" Sam broke off, his throat fighting the words rising in his chest. "He practically worshiped Dad. Always followed him." Jess's question, simple as it was, set off a war inside Sam. Images swarmed front and center, Dad and Dean training, Dean with the car. Dean making Sam Spaghettios. Dean showing up to Sam's soccer games and school plays. "He always wanted me to, too. Said we'd be stronger together."

Jess snuggled in tighter, and Sam realized she was trying to comfort him. Trying to calm him, just by being present. She thought he was grieving.

Sam swallowed harder, his eyes prickling.

Oh God. He was grieving.

"He sounds like he was trying to look out for you."

The lump in his ribs expanded to encompass his throat and shove at his stomach. Sam turned his head into Jess's hair, just trying to breathe. "Jess, I can't."

She nodded against him, the hand on his chest slipping over to his side, until she was squeezing him just a little. She didn't shush him and she didn't tell him to "let it out". She didn't say it would be okay. She just held on, and if his chest weren't already full, he'd think it might bust for loving her.

Sam rolled towards her, his own hands slipping over her waist to fold together at her lower back. He pulled her tighter against him, and she let him. They could hear his father in the living room, grunting something to himself. Sam sobbed once and just held on, to Jess, to normal, to his refusal to even think that if he'd just made different decisions, if he'd been there, Dean might still be out there.

It didn't matter. The choices were made, Schroedinger's Box was open, and Dean was dead. Dean hadn't expected Sam there. He wasn't the one to blame.

*

Sam told Jess to go. She had friends who wouldn't mind putting her up for a few days while he dealt with John, and he could tell she wasn't comfortable having him around in the house, leaving books about demons on the kitchen table, or trying to get her to wear special charms. She refused. Said Sam needed her. She offered to help handle funeral details. Sam knew he didn't deserve her and that she deserved far, far better, but he couldn't bring himself to insist. He didn't want to deal with John alone. He didn't want to deal with bed, and sleep, and nightmares, without her warmth just next to his.

Instead he said "Yeah, that'd be okay," and sent her out to talk to funeral homes and cemetery officials and find out what one did to create a memorial for someone whose body was already gone. He ignored John and his demands that he change his life in the face of the demon he swore was coming, claiming the chaos of the world as evidence -- hurricanes and flooding, brush fires and drought, the what didn't seem to matter, as long as it was natural and devastating. He favored electrical storms, tracing their paths over the mountains and down through the Pacific Northwest, and said it was "getting closer".

Sam told him he was full of shit and closed himself away with his computer. It hurt almost as much to look at John as it did to think about Dean in any way other than bare facts, and he lost himself looking up the few news reports he could find about the motel fire, short blurbs that used phrases like "quickly contained" and "one unidentified victim", words so detached he could pretend it was just a research project, that they weren't talking about the person who'd taught him to salt a room and ride a bike. At night he dreamed, and though he expected to see Dean's face on the ceiling, agonized if not terrified, it was always Jess.

By late evening on Sunday, the second full day of having John as a house guest, Sam's eyes started to cross. He pressed his fingers around his eye sockets, trying to relieve the pressure of his headache without actually closing his eyes. Jess stepped up beside him, closed the lid of the computer and patted Sam on the cheek. "I'm going to take a shower," she said. "You're going to talk to your father."

Sam took a shuddering breath, feeling like he was just coming awake. He looked at her and realized he'd barely done that since John had arrived. And yet she was still there, gently nudging him to eat, to sleep somewhere other than at his desk, to deal. It was a wonder she put up with him. "What would I do without you?"

She usually shot back some flippant comment about him "crashing and burning". This time, she leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. "You won't have to find out." She slipped into the bathroom, hips swaying gently like a dancer, and he waited until she closed the door before fisting his hands and taking a deep, fortifying breath.

It was time to get the truth.

He found John in the living room, where he seemed to spend most of his time. "How do you know?"

John had spent both days sunk to various depths in his bottle of Jack, and for a moment, it seemed, could only blink at Sam. "Know what?"

"How did you know it was him? The fire was worst in two rooms -- one of those was yours, wasn't it?"

John nodded slowly. "I left him behind while I went for some food," he said, voice slow and heavy with the liquor. "Guess the thing got impatient."

Sam shook his head, pressing his knuckles to his temple. "But how do you _know?_ There was nothing left."

"Sam," said John, but Sam wasn't done. He didn't want an answer, he wanted to pour out his questions until his father admitted he was right, that Dean wasn't dead, he was just waiting for them somewhere, wondering what all the fuss was about, why they left him hanging so long. He'd be mad, but he'd forgive them.

Dean always forgave them.

"What, Dad? Dental records? When has Dean ever even been to a dentist?"

"We went --"

"Under different names. Not exactly traceable. Oh, I know, DNA. Except how the hell does anyone even have our DNA on record?"

"Sam," John tried again. Sam wasn't done.

"Maybe jewelry. That it? Did his ring survive? The amulet? All the things that someone could just put on a corpse so you think it's who they say it is? How do you know?"

John paced across room and slammed his bottle down on the TV stand. "Dammit, Sam, I just know, okay?"

Sam shook his head. "No. You always do this. You always make us take it on faith, on your infallible wisdom. Not this time, Dad. If Dean is -- if Dean's dead, I want proof."

John stormed back across the room, this time yanking up on his sleeve, showing off a livid, blistering burn on his forearm. "Because I was there."

Sam stepped back, unable to pull his eyes off that burn. "You said you went for food."

"I lied. You're right, I do that." John yanked his sleeve back down, and Sam felt sick.

"How do I know this is the truth, then?"

"Ask Singer."

"Uncle Bobby?"

John went back for the bottle. "He's the one who had to get it out of me."

Sam didn't want to think too hard about that sentence. "You mean get you out of it."

John kept his back turned to Sam. He didn't lift the bottle to his lips again yet, just studied it as though the answers lay somewhere in with the list of ingredients. "No I don't." His shoulders rose and fell, though Sam didn't think it was a shrug. "I was possessed."

They stood like that for a moment, Sam silently assessing his father, John keeping his back turned. Sam tried to process what his father was saying, but couldn't get past the burn and the simple statement.

John was possessed. He was there. Dean was dead.

None of it would add up.

"What --" he began, but he was interrupted by Jess's scream.

For all their time apart and all of Sam's denial, John and Sam still acted like a well-oiled machine when a sound like that hit their ears. John had a gun out of the back of his pants in a flash, tossing it to Sam. Sam checked the magazine even as he rushed back towards the bedroom and the sound of the still running shower, John not far behind.

They got in just in time to see a blackened figure with sickly yellow eyes turn a pale grin in their direction and vanish. Jess was pressed against the corner where the far wall met the ceiling, her stomach bleeding through her white nightgown, her hair still damp and clinging to the wall behind her. She gagged and coughed, and the sharp scent of smoke hit Sam's nostrils. His mother had burned and his brother had burned and like hell was he letting Jess burn, too.

The next thing he knew, he was kneeling over Jess on the grass outside, smoke and flame leaping from the window of his apartment behind them. He could still smell it, clinging tight to his clothes and skin and hair. The skin on his hands and arms tightened and ached with first degree burns, and Jess's hair was dry and brittle, and she lay beneath his pressing palms and puffs of breath without making a move or a sound, and he knew.

He'd only gotten to her just fast enough to have something to bury.

 _No._

So he pounded and pressed and breathed and begged for he didn't know how long while the gasps and mutters of his neighbors hit his ears. He ignored them, their friends and classmates, struggling to concentrate on the mechanics of CPR, on counting beats and breaths. Jess would come back. She'd come with him, and the friends they'd made wouldn't matter. She was smart and she was fit and now that she knew, now that she couldn't deny it, she'd come with him. She'd insist. It would be terrible, it would be everything that Sam had hoped he'd never have to do or feel again, but it would be worth it to destroy the thing that had destroyed his brother and his normal life.

She just. Had. To breathe.

A hand fell onto his tense back and he nearly took it off with the force of his snarl alone. Soot coated John's face, painting him almost as black as the thing in the apartment, and he knelt next to Sam on the grass, his eyes full of that old familiar determination.

"I'm sorry, Sam."

"No."

Both of John's hands hit Sam's shoulders, pulling him back, pulling him away from his efforts to get Jess breathing. "She's gone, son."

"No!" Sam wrenched forward, but he was exhausted by the evening, by two days of familial stress on top of weeks of nightmares and studying. John dragged him back almost a foot before he broke free.

The moment his shoulders pulled away from John's hands, Jess took a breath.

* 

Time skipped.

Sam was back to kneeling on the grass, one hand supporting Jess' neck, the other pressing down against the wound on her stomach as she gasped and tried to curl in on herself. He struggled to concentrate, to gauge the severity of her wound (it'd already stopped bleeding, so it couldn't be that bad, just a couple stitches and they'd go, they'd be okay, everything would be _fine_ ), but approaching sirens and chattering neighbors and his father's voice and the words _she's alive, she's alive, she's alive_ repeating on a loop like a record in his brain distracted him and all he could do was stare down into her face, tightened down with the effort to clear her lungs.

John's hands hit Sam's shoulders again, and he laughed, a soft, incredulous huff, without pulling away.

"You're okay," he told Jess. His arms tightened and he tugged her up closer to him. Her cheek was wet, and he realized he was crying. "You're okay," he said again, and felt the words lift his ribs and lungs until he felt like he was floating, like he was lighter than he'd been in days.

She looked up at him, surprised, maybe, a little impressed, and determined. She looked like she'd come alive again. "Sam."

John tugged at Sam's shoulders, and her eyes flicked up further, her expression twitching into what Sam thought for a moment must be annoyance, then she turned her face into his chest and said "Sam" again.

Sam leaned down to press his lips into her hair, ignoring John as best he could while the sirens drew closer.

John had never taken well to being ignored.

He gave Sam's shoulders a hard yank, hard enough that Sam nearly dropped Jess, and Sam whirled, holding on tight. "Jesus, Dad --" He broke off mid-sentence as he realized John wasn't looking at him, was instead staring past him. Staring at Jess.

John's voice when was soft, his body positioned to block them from the view of the onlookers. "Sam, let her go."

Jess' fingers wrapped themselves in the hem of Sam's shirt, and she kept her face pressed against his sternum. Sam felt his mouth drop open. "What?"

John's expression was hard -- but then, when wasn't it? He full on glared at Jess, shifting one hand down Sam's arm, trying to pry it away from her. "Let her go."

Sam twisted out of John's grip as best as he could without disturbing Jess. "She's injured, Dad. I'm not just going to leave her here."

Something flickered over John's features, something Sam couldn't immediately identify, and John's hands stilled on his shoulders, though his fingers tightened down hard enough that Sam wondered if he'd end up with bruises. The words that came out of John's mouth next, spoken low and even, were ones Sam never, ever wanted to hear his father speak again.

"She's _dead_ , Sam."

Sam felt something inside him crack, and the rest of him began to lock down. He locked away pain, locked away grief, locked away confusion, and just let the facts, the things he _knew_ flood out to fill in the spaces left behind.

Dean was dead. John had been possessed. Jess was breathing. John was an obsessive, possessive, vengeful man, and Sam was the only thing left he had to hold on to.

Sam's eyes narrowed. "Let me go."

"Sam, listen to me."

Sam jerked his shoulder, shifting on his knees and tugging Jess as gently as he could, working to put space between them and his father. "No."

"Sam --"

" _No._ " Sam matched his father tone for tone. He shifted his arms so he cradled Jess, one under her shoulders, one under her knees, and lifted. His height was one of his few advantages against his father, and he wanted every bit of it. John stepped back as he stood, eyes shifting to Jess' form as she tensed, her arms coming up to wrap around Sam's neck. Sam turned his head to kiss her forehead. "She's okay."

"She's gone, Sam." Jess shuddered in Sam's arms at the words. John lifted his hands, glancing over his shoulder, then stepping to the side again, between Sam, the growing crowd, and the burning building.

Between Sam and the bare remains of his normal life.

With everything locked down, there was only one thing left for Sam to feel, and facing John, it was as easy and natural as breathing.

"You son of a bitch." This time, Sam stepped forward, shifting his grip around Jess as she pulled tighter to his chest. He fought the urge to raise his voice as he loomed over his father, his every word bringing a twitch to the man's features. "You brought this here. You got possessed, you got Dean killed, and you brought it here."

"Sam --" John's jaw locked down, and Sam could see the effort it took him to control his own fury in return. "You need to put your issues with me aside _and put the girl down._ "

"My issues?" Sam snorted. "These are not my issues, Dad. They never have been. Your obsession destroyed our family, and now you want to destroy mine."

John's whole face darkened. "You think I destroyed this family? You're the one who walked away, Sam."

"Yeah. And it was the best decision I've made in my life." The sirens howled as two firetrucks and a PAFD ambulance pulled around the corner and came down the block. Sam stepped around John, determined to keep him at his back as he carried Jess towards the trucks. He felt John turn with him.

"Sammy --"

Sam turned his head just enough to show John his profile. "It's. Sam." Jess lifted her head, twisting slightly in Sam's arms to look back over his shoulder, and he thought for a second she may have smiled. Sam turned back, lifting his chin as he saw the EMTs climb out of the ambulance. He lowered Jess' legs to the ground gently so he could wave them over, and Jess wobbled but held her weight.

He was more than willing to forget about John entirely, but John brushed past his shoulder as he started towards his truck, parked down the street. Sam shifted, his free arm going protectively around Jess's waist, but John only paused a moment to catch Sam's eyes.

John looked like he'd aged even in those few seconds Sam's back was turned, his body stooped, his eyes sad in a way Sam couldn't remember ever seeing before. "I'll fix this, Sam." Sam frowned, his anger thinning out as confusion began to leak back in. Then John glanced over at Jess. "Don't trust her."

And he turned and strode away, head high and shoulders set, and Sam scowled.

Even now, John still always needed the last word.

"Sam," Jess said, leaning against his side, her weight just off center enough to start to pull him around, away from John's retreating figure, and away from the EMTs and crowds. "I don't want to go to the hospital."

"It's okay." Sam adjusted his grip on her waist and tried to pull her back upright. "They just need to look you over. We almost lost you."

"But you didn't." Jess leaned harder, her hand coming up to press on his chest. "You can look after me."

Sam frowned and let her maneuver him. To be honest, he didn't want her in the hospital, either, _she's fine_ still repeating in his head, and John's warning that he would ‘fix' things hanging hollow in his ears. He didn't want to let her out of his sight for that long. "I've got some training. Are you sure?"

"I don't trust the hospital, Sam." She tilted her head, stepping away more gracefully than he'd have thought the cut on her stomach would have allowed. "I trust you." She glanced past him towards the ambulance. Sam turned with her, and she pulled his arm over the blood stain on her shirt and smiled at the EMTs who were rapidly approaching.

"We're okay," she said, her voice shaky, but determined. The EMT stopped, looking them both over slowly, and Sam realized they'd managed to end up in a spot where the lighting was just dim enough that the man might mistake the blood stain for shadows, Jess' burned hair for bedhead.

"You sure about that, ma'am?" The EMT glanced towards Sam, and he nodded, following Jess' lead. She was steady on her feet, enough to shift him around, and he wasn't going to force her to go in the ambulance if she didn't to. _She's fine. She trusts me._

"We're okay. Just shaken up." Sam nodded towards the gathered crowd now being pushed back by firemen and police officers. "Do you know what happened?"

"Not yet. Probably won't for awhile." The EMT looked them over again, but Sam could see his attention was already turning back towards the building and the crowd. "Either of you decide for any reason you're _not_ okay, you call 911. Got me?"

Jess nodded, leaning her head on Sam's shoulder. "We will." Sam hugged her, flashing a tired smile, and marveling at how easily she took to the rhythms of obfuscation he'd grown up with.

John's warning rang in his head again, but he mentally shoved it off. John was an asshole, and Sam was determined never to believe a word he said again.

As the EMT turned away, Jess lifted her head from Sam's shoulder and looked up at him. "We need to talk."

Sam swallowed and nodded. "I know. I should have told you about this a long time ago."

"Yeah, you should have." She threaded her arm through his and turned, leading him further down the street away from the fire, where no one would pay them the least bit of attention. "That's why I'm going to tell you this right now. I don't want any more secrets between us."

"Jess --" Sam cut off when she put a finger to his lips. She glanced towards the building and the firefighters still running back and forth in front of it.

"I'm dead, Sam."

The crack that had started with John saying the same thing -- that, to be honest, had probably started when John first showed up in their kitchen two nights and a lifetime ago -- split wider. He couldn't be hearing her properly. "Jess?"

She took a deep, slow breath, and a distant part of Sam's mind noted that she'd recovered from the smoke remarkably quickly. "Jess is dead."

He definitely wasn't hearing her properly. Sam opened his mouth to argue, but she rushed on.

"I'm not Jess. My name is Ruby. Your dad was right about that, but not about not trusting me. I'm here to help you."

Sam frowned, pulling back slightly. "If this is a side effect of the smoke --" Her eyes went black, completely black, for the space of a single eye blink, then returned to their usual blue. "What the hell?"

"You've never seen one of me before, have you?" Jess' tone took on an edge of wonder. "After everything you've hunted."

Sam felt like he couldn't breathe. "What are you?"

"I know it's a lot to process, but I'm Ruby. And I'm here to help you." Jess -- Ruby rather -- tilted her head, the very picture of earnesty. The fly aways, which had seemed charmingly tragic on Jess, took on a pathetic air. Sam's brain buzzed, already so full with all the other revelations he'd been trying to take in over the weekend. He couldn't process this. It couldn't be happening.

"Why are you telling me this? Why are you -- you're in my girlfriend's body? Jess is -- what did you do?"

Ruby's expression went sympathetic and sad, just bordering on pitying. "She's gone, Sam. She was gone before I got here. John said it himself. The demon killed her." She ran her hands over her sleep clothes, seemingly unmindful of the blood. "This was the only way I knew I could talk to you."

Sam's mind spun fast enough to make him dizzy, and he backed away again, but the thing in Jess followed him forward, her hand reaching out for his wrist. She grabbed it before he could pull away, her grip tight, almost painful. Sam twisted his arm, but couldn't get out of her grip.

"Get out of her."

Ruby shook her head. "I can't."

Sam yanked again, but only succeeded in pulling Ruby a step closer to him. "Get out of her."

Ruby matched him tone for tone, intensity for intensity. "I can't." She let go of his wrist and spread her hands. "This is me, now. I know this is hard --"

"You don't know anything. That's my girlfriend. I was going to --"

"Propose?" Ruby tilted her -- Jess' -- head and smiled faintly. "I know. But you were never going to get the chance. Jess died tonight, and there's nothing you could have done to stop it."

Sam wanted to turn away, but his knees locked, holding him in place. Every feeling he'd been desperately avoiding for days, all the pain and grief and confusion and soul-deep _sickness_ he'd spent hours drowning out with as much anger as he could muster, swarmed up and enveloped him. It drowned out the sounds of the fire and trucks and hoses, blacked out the street, and chased all the heat from the air around him. It choked up his veins and weighed down his lungs and he wondered if he was actually dying right here, standing in the street with this woman claiming to be using his girlfriend, the only remaining link he had to his entire life before tonight.

He realized he hoped he was.

Then he felt her breath on his face and he knew that he wasn't.

"Sam," she said.

"Leave me alone."

"I can't do that either."

He sobbed. "Please."

"I'm sorry." She lifted her hands and pressed them to his cheeks. "I never meant to take this body, but things are moving in ways no one expected. This was the only way to talk to you."

"Things --" Sam choked on his own breath, turning his head away. "Dean."

She ran a hand over the top of his head. "Yes."

"And now Jess."

"It's hard." She wrapped her arms around his waist, squeezing gently. "I was human once, Sam. I know what it's like to lose the ones you love." She took a breath, seemed to brace herself, and continued. "Even at the hands of someone you thought you could trust."

Sam shuddered. "Dad."

"He was there. He said it himself." She turned back to him, Jess' beautiful face twisting faintly with concern and pity. "Sam, why do you think the demon came here, tonight?"

He stared past her towards the fire, not willing to see that expression on his girlfriend's face. "Him."

"I'm sorry," she said again, and he knew she meant it as agreement.

Sam looked at the apartment. He thought about the timing of Jess' scream, about the certainty in his father's voice when he said the demon would be coming to Palo Alto. "It wanted to stop him. It didn't want me to know. He knew that would happen, but I pushed him into --"

"Sam, no." She put her hands to his face again, pulling his focus back onto her. "You didn't do anything wrong. This isn't your fault. I'm here to help you."

Sam swallowed. He didn't hear those words often. "I don't -- I don't have a car."

"That's okay. We can work something out."

He took a deep breath, feeling himself steadying in the face of her calm certainty. "What are you?"

She sighed. "I'm a demon."

Sam flinched. "Then why --"

"I'm not that kind of a demon."

"I don't know if I can trust you."

She nodded, lowering her hands and stepping back. "It'll take time. I can't be the easiest thing to look at, right now." She looked down at her right hand, then extended it, palm upwards. "But I won't lie to you. Even when it seems like a lie might be easier."

Sam's breath hitched. "No one's ever promised that before."

"I know."

He closed his eyes. His life was gone, his ties to everything he'd been literally burned behind him, with his father, his only living family, the one likely responsible for it all. Ruby was offering him something he wasn't going to find anywhere else -- help and answers.

He took her hand. "I guess we have work to do."

 **BOBBY**

Bobby had just about reached the bottom of his first bottle of the day when the phone rang. He nearly missed it, the way the weather outside was raging -- the unseasonable warmth of the past week or so had brought winds, lightning, and rain, the likes of which he didn't often see outside of the height of the summer storm season. The wind and rain were far more appropriate to his mood than the dry heat had been -- in that weather he could only languish, in this, he was occasionally tempted to step outside and rage into the storm, a Lear without his fool, just a sad, lonely old man.

Karen would kick his ass. Hell, Jodie would, too, along with half the town, assuming they didn't just try to lock him up on another drunk and disorderly.

He only kept one phone hooked up, these days. Sometimes he thought he should disconnect that one, too, just disappear for awhile into the solitude and silence of his house. As tempting as that was, and as much as he wanted to ignore the world, he couldn't bring himself to unhook his private line. There were more hunters out there than just the Winchesters, and he couldn't bear the idea of someone else losing a son or a brother or an honorary nephew for want of information he might be able to provide.

Still, didn't mean he had to be polite about it.

"What?"

"Bobby." The voice on the other end of the line breathed out heavily, the sound triggering something in the back of Bobby's head. He could practically see the speaker's face, and his lungs almost froze in his chest. "Thank god, someone's answering their damned phone."

Bobby's voice came out gruff and angry. It was a damn sight better than the tired and desolate sound of his thoughts in his own head. "Who is this?"

A pause, then the voice continued, speaking in a rush. "Okay, it's been awhile. And maybe I'm one of the last people you want to hear from. But it's me." Another pause. "Dean. Winches --"

 _No._

Bobby hung up.

The name the caller cited wasn't a surprise. Bobby recognized Dean's voice, even scratchy and pathetic as it had been over the bad connection. What surprised him was that anyone would bother trying to get to him that way. Those in the know about what had happened would know he was involved -- know that he knew Dean had passed on.

The phone rang again, and Bobby was tempted to let it go. The dregs of his bottle didn't seem like enough, anymore, and he wasn't hanging around to get harassed. Dean didn't deserve to get used that way. He'd been a good kid, and a hell of a hunter, even if he suffered from congenital idiocy.

He grabbed up the phone.

"Bobby," said Dean's voice.

"Look, I don't know what you're trying to pull," Bobby said, hissing hard enough to feel the hairs of his mustache rattle against his lip. "But you call here again and I'll kill you."

He hung up.

The phone didn't ring again.

*

The roar of a truck pulling into his lot shook Bobby out of his third drunken stupor of the day. He hadn't gotten far in his grief cycle -- he could still keep track of just how often he got shitfaced. He'd be forgiven, he thought, for coming outside with a loaded shotgun to greet whomever had decided to ignore his 'CLOSED, goddammit' sign on the front gates. He'd even wager on being forgiven for keeping said shotgun locked and loaded when John Winchester practically fell out of that giant black truck sans Sam.

"The hell're you doin' here?"

John looked up blearily -- hell, it looked like he'd spent the last week practically behind the wheel of that truck, and while Bobby knew as well as anyone that the trip from Palo Alto to South Dakota wasn't exactly a short one, it sure as hell didn't take a body a week. "Singer," said Winchester. "You drunk?"

"Goddamn right I am." Bobby lowered the gun a fraction. "The hell aren't you?"

John didn't dignify the question with an answer, which, to be fair, it didn't much deserve. "Need your books," he said.

"Hell, that's all I am to you. A babysitter and a librarian."

"Books, Singer."

"Where's Sam?"

The look John gave him was long and painfully blank, save for his eyes. Bobby cursed. "Tell me he ain't --"

"No, he 'ain't'. Just smart enough to realize he still needs to be as far away from me as possible."

Bobby relaxed. "You saved his girl, then?"

John's expression darkened, his brows lowering, lips pressing together. Bobby decided not to pursue that particular line of questioning.

"He coming by for the Impala?"

John shrugged, pushing past Bobby to step into the house.

"He honorin' his brother at all?!"

"Books, Singer!"

And that was all Bobby was able to get out of him for quite some time.

*

It took several days for Bobby to sober up enough to really start paying attention to which of his books John was looking into.

"Oh hell, Winchester. Don't tell me you're after that again."

"This thing took my wife, Bobby. It took my son."

"And going after it like you're insane is gonna make that right? You think this is what Dean woulda wanted?"

John glanced up from the book he was flipping through for the first time in what seemed like hours. His cheeks were puffed and heavy with grief and lack of sleep, though his eyes glinted sharp as always. "Yes. I do."

Bobby sighed and lowered himself down in the chair across from John, pulling one of the discarded books towards him and flipping a page or two almost absently. "How do you know this thing even exists?"

"It has to."

"That ain't no kind of answer."

"Then stop asking me 'no kind' of questions."

Bobby flipped his book shut. "John." He waited a moment, but didn't get any more eye contact. "You been on this crusade for longer than I've known you. I ain't expecting you to back off now. But are you sure this is the way you're gonna do it?"

"It's the only way I've found."

Bobby tugged on the brim of his hat, then pushed himself back to his feet. "Well. You let me know what else you might need."

His answer was little more than a grunt from John. This was why he'd always preferred Sam and Dean. Lord knew where they got it from, but those boys were at least willing to talk to him about whatever they needed. They looked to Bobby for advice. John just looked to him as a convenient place to rest.

The grief curdled low in Bobby's chest. Well. If John didn't need his services as a librarian just now, then he figured he might as well find his way back down to the bottom of that bottle of Jack.

*

The next car to pull up to Bobby's house didn't rumble like the Impala, nor did it roar like John's truck. This one sputtered and clacked and Bobby grabbed his receipt book from the table in the kitchen before heading to the door. He peered out the window and noted the make of the car -- an old Thunderbird, terrible condition by the sound of it, absolutely covered in road dust and debris. The door opened, and a tall figure eased itself out, for a moment silhouetted against the dying sun and transformed into an elongated, boxy coat on two legs. Bobby blinked and adjusted his hat, and the figure came into focus.

"Winchester!" Bobby didn't look over his shoulder, instead leaning forward to drink in the sight of the young man, and the tall blonde who unfolded from the passenger seat. "It's your boy!"

Silence greeted him. Bobby turned and found the stack of books John had barely moved from in a week abandoned on the desk. A quick check through a side window revealed his truck gone, too.

Bastard must have let it roll through the front yard to the road, slipped off without even so much as a "so long". Figured.

Bobby stepped out onto the porch and tugged the brim of his hat. "Sam. Real sorry about your brother."

Pain flashed across his face before Sam nodded grimly, stepping around the Thunderbird to take his girl by the arm and lead her in Bobby's direction. "Bobby. This is Jess."

The girl shot Sam a look, then stuck out her hand with an awkward grin. "Mr. Singer. Sam's told me a lot about you."

Bobby nudged the brim of his hat upward a degree, taking the blonde in as much as he could without looking like he was channeling Humbert Humbert. Way John had been talking, Bobby'd been sure Sam's girl was dead. He took her hand for a brief shake. It was cold, but Bobby didn't need to get close to that junk heap of a car to figure its heater didn't work for shit. Something niggled and twinged in the back of his mind, but it was no good chasing after it just yet -- he'd pickled his brain often enough to know when he wasn't working on all cylinders.

"That so?" he asked.

Sam grimaced. "Only in the last couple of days. I'm sorry about this, but we're in kind of a rush and -- I didn't want to do this over the phone." Sam swallowed, and Jess turned into his grip, turning it from a gentlemanly escort sort of pose into something more resembling a half-hug. "Dad said you were there."

There was no question which "there" Sam was asking about. "I was." Bobby looked between the two again. "Why don't you come inside for a drink? I can tell you all about it."

Sam shook his head maybe a little too quickly. Bobby wondered if Sam was cutting himself and his girl off from the world, way he'd ditched his daddy and seemed so anxious to get back out of the scrapyard. "We can't stay. I just -- you're sure?"

And there was hope there, the way Sam's eyes widened and his lips pursed up just a little bit. Bobby cursed John for the umpteenth time in his head. He wasn't supposed to be the one to have to do this.

"Yeah, Sam. I'm sure."

Sam's face didn't fall, but the support system that held that hope in place crumbled away and Bobby could see it teetering, could see how Sam was barely holding himself together in front of Jess. He nodded. "Okay. Uh, thanks. Bobby."

The boy danced in place, and Bobby cleared his suddenly dry, aching throat. "I got the Impala out back. You know she's yours."

Jess's polite smile reemerged from under a patina of sympathetic, second-hand grief. "That'd be --"

"No." Sam's answer surprised them both, it seemed. His brows lowered, and he pulled Jess back almost half a step. "I'm sorry, Bobby, I can't --"

Bobby nodded. "I understand. She's here whenever you're ready."

Sam nodded back like a toy dog, head bobbing up and down with little meaning. "We really have to go."

"You know I wish you wouldn't."

"Yeah." Sam reached out, clapping Bobby on the shoulder, the first hand gesture he'd made towards the man since he'd arrived. "Thanks, Bobby."

"It was nice to meet you," Jess said. She seemed to linger slightly behind Sam as he pulled her back towards that crappy Thunderbird. Bobby tipped his hat to her.

"That car could use some work, you know," he said, raising his voice to make sure Sam heard him over his hurry.

"Uh huh." The answer was absent, and the next thing Bobby new, Sam and Jess were bundled back into the car and reversing back out of the parking lot. That was Sam to a T, though, always the impetuous one, always so impatient to get on his way.

God, Bobby missed Dean.

He went back inside to get a little bit of basic cleaning out of the way before he sank himself into yet another bottle. He didn't remember leaving the Oil of Abramelin out, or the acacia, but the way his head had been, he'd --

 _Hell_.

Bobby stumbled his way over stacks of books to get to one of his phones, all the while trying to remember if John had gotten himself a new number. He gave the one he remembered a shot either way, but wasn't surprised when it rung up as being disconnected. He slammed the phone back down.

Son of a bitch had been nabbing demon summoning ingredients. And Bobby suspected he knew exactly what John planned to use as a bargaining chip.

*

When Sam left, Bobby honestly thought he'd seen the last of the Winchesters. Hunting down John was never an easy prospect, and the man had to know that Bobby had worked out his plan, so though he looked, he doubted he'd be able to track him down.

The only kind of person able to think enough like a Winchester to find a Winchester was another Winchester himself, and Bobby was fresh out.

Was running low on liquor, too, to be precise. And while Bobby had dragged himself out of the bottom of a bottle by his bootstraps once, he wasn't exactly looking forward to trying to do it again. Time to brave going into town, straight to the liquor store, too. And wouldn't that just make Jodie love him so.

He checked in on the Impala once on his way out, tempted as always to crank her up and get her out on the road. It wouldn't do to let a car like that sit. That was when cars really died, when they spent all their time just sitting around, settling slowly towards rust and the earth. Leaving a car like the Impala to sit in a junkyard when there was nothing physically wrong with her? It damn near broke his heart. Still, Bobby couldn't bring himself to drive her. Only Winchesters held that right -- and again, Bobby was fresh out.

He circled back around the house to one of his slightly less beat up cars and paused.

Someone was standing in the gates.

"We're closed!"

The man at the gates stood there, just looking Bobby over. Bobby felt the hair on the back of his neck begin to rise. Legends of vampires or demons requiring invitations into homes might have been false, as far as Bobby knew, but that didn't mean there weren't creatures out there that followed more closely to the old stories.

"Well, fine. Come in then -- if you're able."

The man shuffled his feet, then stepped forward. He was Sam's height or thereabouts, though he was built far broader, closer to John in size. His hair was long and lank, combed away from his face past well trimmed sideburns, and he wore flannel and denim like they were badges of rank. As he stepped through the shadows of the trees lining the yard, Bobby gasped.

"Hey, Bobby." The man smiled, sheepishly, as though he knew he was an impossibility and even felt a bit bad about that, but was doing what he thought he had to be doing, anyway. It was a familiar enough smile.

"Holy hell."

The man reached up to rub the back of his neck, still smiling. He didn't take his eyes off Bobby for a moment, though he didn't seem threatened. "It's been awhile."

Bobby snorted. "Awhile, hell. I just seen the boy you're tryin' to imitate two days ago, and let me tell you: you need to work on your detailing."

The thing that looked like Sam looked down over his body, then back up. "Did I change that much?" He shook his head. "Bobby, it's me. I'm willing to prove it."

"So help me, I will --"

"Shoot me, yeah. I'd kind of prefer not to die, though, so can we stick with maybe just a holy-water laced beer or something?" He smiled again, and it was a tired expression this time, one Bobby had seen on John's face a time or two, but never on Sam's. "I'm kinda thirsty."

Bobby narrowed his eyes at him. "Fine. You wait here." He took a step back, then stopped. He'd already drunk all the beer. "Hell. Just take a swig of this." He pulled his silver flask from his pocket and tossed it to the thing that looked like Sam. It didn't react except to catch the flask and drain it dry. "What are you?"

The man shrugged, tossing the flask back to Bobby. "Fair question," he said. "Easiest answer is probably just to say I'm a time traveler."

Bobby stared at him for a beat, then sighed. "Well can you jump on ahead about half an hour? I'm outta booze and I get the feeling I, at least, am gonna want a lot of it."

Sam -- or the thing that looked like him or whatever, Bobby was not nearly drunk enough to work that all out properly, just now -- tilted his head. "It doesn't really work like that. I can wait a little while, though, if you want."

Bobby scowled. "What, and let you fool around my property? Like hell, boy." He started stalking back to the house. When he didn't hear any footsteps behind him, he turned. "You comin' or what?"

The man nodded, jogging to catch up. "Sorry, it's just -- it's really good to see you walking."

Bobby didn't want to know what that was supposed to mean.

*

Bobby didn't exactly have the physical size to force this man who said he was Sam to do much of anything -- the man was a beast, and this from someone used to bossing John Winchester around. It was next to impossible to reconcile the almost too thin, lanky figure of Sam showing up with his girl a few days before with this healthy, weight-lifter-looking guy taking up the entire doorway into Bobby's kitchen. The fact that the man waited for Bobby to nod him into a seat rather than just barge in -- and went willingly if not quite meekly when Bobby did nod -- put several points in his favor, as did the casual way he cut at his arm with a silver knife to prove he wasn't some sort of shapeshifter. He answered every question Bobby threw at him easily -- well, as easily as one might expect someone from five years down the line to be able to. Kid knew when they'd met, how they'd met, how Bobby'd earned the role of "uncle", Bobby's middle name, even the source of Dean's favorite accessory.

"He thinks of you as a father, you know," the man said, smiling easily, showing off the dimples and pearly whites that Sam had been using to sway things in his favor since about the time he'd learned to walk. Of course, Bobby'd gotten wise to him right around the same time.

"Thinks, huh?"

The man nodded, all earnest, like a puppy. Nice trick, considering he was built like a wall. "Well, okay, maybe not yet, I think he probably thinks you're mad at him right now, but he --"

"He's dead." Bobby was never one for sugar-coating anything, least of all bad news. If this man wanted him to believe he was Sam, even one from the future, he was missing some vital information. "Which you should already know, seein' as you're from the future and all."

The man wasn't what Bobby would exactly call "tan" -- hell, he looked like he hadn't seen the proper side of a sunny day in a dog's age -- but he dropped a few shades at that, swallowing and looking down. If he'd made even a single offensive move, Bobby would have blown him away right there, but the look on that boy's face, peering at his shoes, that was 100% grief, right there. "How?"

"Same as his mother." Bobby shook his head. "Almost understand John, now. That ain't a sight that's been kind to my dreams, lately."

The man glanced around the kitchen, eying up the bottles Bobby hadn't bothered to toss out, just yet. He nodded slowly, then looked up at Bobby, grief now warring with determination for control over his features. "Something's gone wrong in the timeline," he said. "It's November, right? Dean and I -- we should be hunting a wendigo out in Colorado just now."

Bobby snorted. "You really need to work on your cover stories, kid. Ain't no one's heard of a wendigo that far west."

"Yeah, that's what Dean said." The man shrugged. "It still went up in flames just the same." He placed his hands on the table, palms open and flat on the wood. Demonstrating that he wasn't armed, Bobby figured. "I'm telling you the truth. I'm from the future. Something's messing with the timeline, and I'm going to set it right."

"So the Dean in your time --"

"Alive and kicking."

"And you two are hunting together."

"Well, yeah. I mean, mostly it's stumbling on small hunts while we're after --" The man cut himself off with a shake of his head. "That's not the important bit."

"Let me guess. Can't tell me too much about the future without risking the space-time continuum?"

The man smiled slightly. "I know, a little Doc Brown. Truth is, the continuum is probably pretty screwed by this point, anyway. If Dean's dead here. . . ." He swallowed again. "It's too late to try and put things back where they were. But maybe I can still make it better."

The questions in Bobby's head were all clamoring too hard with each other for any to quite make it out of his mouth. He had to admit, the kid seemed to have his story straight -- something came back to take Dean out? He could buy that. Boy had a tendency to make you either love him or hate him. He'd've made plenty of enemies, if he'd lived.

The phone rang before he could make sense of all the questions he had for this future Sam, the first time in days. He couldn't quite bring himself to hope it was either Winchester managing to get their heads out of their asses. "I'm gonna need more answers than that," he told the man at his kitchen table. "Just let me get this."

The man nodded, then looked down at his fingers, looking like he was thinking things over for his own self. Bobby grabbed the phone off the hook and went to the other side of the kitchen, keeping his eyes fixed on him.

"Yeah?" Damn, but he hoped this wasn't the thing trying to sound like Dean again.

"Bobby?" Definitely not Dean. Too excited for one. Too female for another. "It's me."

"Jo." Bobby noted the way the man's head shot up at that, his eyes going wide. Bobby turned to the side and lowered his voice. "What's up?"

"You know a lot about demons, right?"

"Yep."

"Think you can help me with a plan to get rid of one?"

"Could do. Your momma gonna come skin me for it?"

"Bobby." Her tone was pure not-quite-teenage exasperation. "Don't start that. I'm not some kid, any more."

It seemed to Bobby that the only ones who made that argument were the ones who were still kids. "Tailing your regulars on hunts ain't the same as going up against a demon, Jo."

"You'd rather I just leave it there?"

"Get the feeling I ain't gonna get what I'd rather from you." Bobby sighed and grabbed one of the many notebooks that seemed to multiply across his house, and after a bit of sorting through papers managed to come up with a pen. "What kind of situation you looking at?" He jotted down notes as Jo talked -- something about a demon in a mental hospital, harassing a patient. "Campbell? You sure that's his name?"

"Not really. Why?"

Bobby shook his head, looking over his notes. "It's nothing. Heard a few things about a family by that name hunting out in Kansas. Before your time -- hell, almost before mine." He caught sight of the man at his table watching him carefully and turned his back fully on him. "Right, you got access to a computer or a fax machine or something? Got something I dug up in the Seal of Solomon that should be able to help you out." He paused while Jo flipped through some pages on her end, then copied down the fax number. "Yeah, I'll have it sent out in a couple minutes. You got back up on this? Your momma'll never forgive me if I get her little girl --" Jo cut him off with a number of not-terribly-ladylike remarks and he smiled. "Alright, alright, I get it. Just for chrissake be careful." He hung up, ripped the page out of his notebook and shot the man a look. "I gotta send something out. Don't be getting any ideas, now. I wanna see you planted right there when I get back."

The man nodded quickly and folded his arms. Bobby tugged his hat lower over his forehead and gave him a hard look before turning on his heel to head into the library.

So much for hermiting himself. Between John's idiotic quest to get himself killed, Jo diving headfirst into the demon hunting pool, and the supposed Sam from the future, he'd be lucky if he had time to come up for air, much less get properly blasted. Well, either way, it'd hopefully at least distract him from his grief.

He got back from sending the fax to find Sam sitting right where he left him, looking antsy. "Right. Start talking."

"Actually," Sam said. "I should probably get going. I can give you my number, though. You can call me if you hear anything?"

Bobby narrowed his eyes at him, fingers lingering on the butt of the gun he kept tucked into his waistband. "You running off just like that? Hell, kid, why'd you even show up in the first place?"

Sam shrugged. "Just wanted to give you a heads up, make sure you had my number if you heard anything. We, uh, kinda got to depending on you, you know?"

Bobby felt something in his chest soften, and realized that despite his better judgement, he'd definitely started to believe this man was Sam. Maybe it was the things that only a Winchester should know. Maybe it was the grief at hearing about his brother. Maybe it was just that this Sam looked about a hundred times more with it and healthy than the one who'd showed up two days ago, giving Bobby hope that Sam could get himself put back together. He nodded. "Shouldn't be doing this." He pulled the Impala's key out of his pocket. "And there'll be hell to pay if I'm wrong. But she needs to be drove." He tossed the key to Sam, who caught it, then stared at it, eyes wide. "You take care of her, or you _will_ regret it. And give me a goddamn call when you get the chance."

Sam nodded, back to the eager puppy look. "I'll make this better, Bobby. I promise. Everything's gonna be okay."

And God help him, Bobby even believed it.

 **JO**

The label on the folder said "Jack Campbell", and that was good enough for Jo. Rick had always had a thing for militaristic science fiction, and Harry Turtledove would have been harder to pull off. She couldn't help but think he'd get a kick out of using a pseudonym for a pseudonym, and getting himself locked up in a mental institution would go a long way in explaining why he hadn't contacted her in so long.

Three months. Too. Fucking. Long.

Jo had been practically overjoyed when she got Ash's email -- just the basic facts, really, a "Jack Campbell" institutionalized not far from her school, claiming to hunt monsters. Her email back was just as succinct: _Give me an in. Don't tell my mom._ Ellen knew a little about Rick, just enough to worry without realizing just how painful his disappearance was. Hell, for all Ellen knew, he contacted Jo at school all the time, and that was how Jo planned to keep it. She planned to ditch school the moment she got him back -- Ellen could get the message when she didn't get a bill for Jo's second semester tuition. She'd cheered, anxious to get away from home, when her application had been accepted, but it hadn't taken her long after orientation to realize that it wasn't where she belonged.

She belonged out there, with Rick, on the road. Doing her father proud and worrying her mother sick. It was what she needed to be doing. She'd basically known that from the few hunts she'd managed to assist in, over the years. Now it was just a matter of convincing everybody else.

Ash's email in return was typical Ash: _Am Mr. Discretion. Your secret is safe_ , along with a list of details about staffing and security systems and schedules for the inpatient facility. She'd rolled her eyes, waved her roommate off when she asked what was so interesting, and typed a reply.

 _Just try and keep it secret for a LITTLE while._

Ash couldn't lie worth crap. It was why she always beat him at poker, even when he was counting cards.

And now she was here, ditching freshman English to steal a lab coat with "Clive Altman" stitched to the lapel, snatch a file from an open office, and find herself one "Jack Campbell". She tried to remind herself that it was a long shot -- how likely was it, really, that Rick would end up hospitalized so close to her school? Unless he'd been trying to get back to her. Unless he'd been sticking close to "home". Unless unless unless -- she couldn't help but believe. She wanted it too badly.

That made it all that much harder to keep the disappointment off her face when she stepped into the day room and called "Jack Campbell?" and a man who wasn't Rick pushed himself up from a table with a resigned grunt. He was about Rick's height, tall without being massive, and clearly in good shape. She could detect a faint rounding to his features and his stomach beneath his gray t-shirt, though that probably had more to do with time spent living on hospital food than any particular lifestyle choice. He wore a dingy flannel robe over his t-shirt and a pair of equally washed out scrub pants. His shoes were clearly hospital issue, more slippers than anything with real substance, and his robe lacked a belt. When he shifted his arms to fold them over his chest, she spotted a flash of clean white on both wrists, and though he hid his hands quickly, she thought she saw bandages extending over his right palm to his index finger and thumb.

Not just not Rick, but a suicide risk to boot.

She suddenly had no idea what she was doing here.

His hair was short, flattened, and pressed to one side as though he couldn't be bothered with it. Though he looked slightly sick, both physically and emotionally, he seemed at odds with his surroundings, vigilant not in a way she associated with crazy people in the movies or on TV, but in a way so familiar to her that it took her a moment to figure out why she noticed it.

He took up space like a hunter.

When he looked at her, his face fell open for a moment and she spotted a bewildered recognition followed by an instant of grief before his expression shut back down. He approached, not quite a swagger, but not quite a full limp, his arms still held tight to his chest. Jo stayed rooted to the spot, options streaming through her head. She could turn and leave, let this apparently crazy hunter stew out his time in the locked ward until he could convince the doctors he wasn't a threat to society. She could interrogate him -- there was a possibility, however faint, that he knew Rick, might know where he was, or at least what had happened to him. Or she could break him out, the way she'd planned to bust Rick out. Hunters would always come off as crazy to the rest of the world -- though the bandages on his arms would indicate he might just be crazy for their world, too.

She hadn't come to any conclusions by the time he reached her. He peered at her from not quite two feet away, arms still crossed, and his lips twitched up on the side into a smirk.

"Doctor Altman," he said, pitching his voice low and glancing up to flash his teeth at someone over her shoulder before glancing back down. "You've changed."

Jo set her jaw and stared back up. She'd had larger, more frightening men than this "Jack" try to intimidate her. It never worked at the Roadhouse, and it sure as hell wouldn't work here, where she knew he was barred from carrying any sort of weapon. "Jack," she said. "Looks like you're in a good mood, today. Let's have a word in private."

He tilted his head and looked her over again, another twitch of grief pulling at his features before he grinned. He kept his voice soft, but this time didn't move his eyes from her face. "That's not really how it's done," he said. "You're not supposed to be alone with me. You could take advantage."

"Or you could attack," Jo noted. "I'm willing to take that chance." She'd been training for years, and always against experienced opponents who were larger, heavier, and stronger than she was. She had no doubt she could at least get away from this guy, if not actually subdue him.

"Doctor," said one of the aides, possibly the one Jack had been grinning at over her shoulder. She glanced back at him as he stepped up, one hand on something on his hip which she couldn't make out. "Campbell bothering you?"

Jack stepped back and seemed to shrink into himself a bit, shoulders hunching forward and arms pressing tighter to his ribs, even as he flashed his teeth at the aide again. "Nah, man. Just talking."

The aide nodded, but didn't move away or take his hand off his hip. Jo thought about what Jack had just said about not going anywhere alone and figured this must be their chaperon. She turned back to Jack, holding the folder so it blocked the aide's view of her name tag. "I guess we'd best have a seat, then," she said. If Jack was really a hunter, there'd be words they could use, a not-quite-code of the hunting world that should go right over a civilian's head -- or at least not be out of the ordinary, given what little Ash had been able to dig up. She nodded to the table Jack had been seated at. "By the window look good?"

Jack kept half an eye on the aide as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. He glanced at her in brief flashes, like he didn't want to look away from the aide for too long. "Depends, Doc," he said. Jo frowned, and he ducked his head, dropping his volume not quite as low as it'd been when he was calling her bluff. "You know the name of God?" His eyes flicked sideways to the aide and back. She glanced over just as quickly, while keeping her body and her face firmly facing Jack.

"You mean 'Christo'?" She flicked her glance over again, and couldn't quite bring herself to be surprised when she saw the aide's eyes go momentarily black. His lips curled back in what could probably be mistaken by an outsider as a smile, and he narrowed his eyes at her, giving her a long look, as though memorizing her face. Then his lips curled further, his head dipping in a tiny nod. _Congratulations,_ she imagined him thinking. _You're on my list, next._ Jack twitched back another inch, and Jo hoped that none of the other people in the room noticed when she couldn't stop herself from doing so, too. She'd seen vampires and ghosts, and thought herself too tough to scare, but goddamn, demons were _freaky_. Even the flare of the aide's nostrils, while outwardly harmless, seemed to take on a malevolent air.

Then his eyes returned to normal and he stepped back, waving them towards the table. "I'll leave you to it, then, Doc."

Jo kept her voice level and even as she looked back at Jack, tilting her head. "After you," she said. _I've got your back -- at least for now._

Jack's eyes didn't stray away from the aide's again. "Yeah. Table by the window's good." He shuffled backward, that hint of a swagger still twisting his hips, though he refused to turn his back on the aide. Jo forced herself not to peer back at the possessed man herself, not willing to risk breaking her cover with the rest of the staff. She looked only once they were both seated and Jack seemed to relax slightly into the chair, indicating that the aide's attention had been turned elsewhere. She turned back to Jack, setting his file into her lap. "So," she said, then didn't know how to continue.

Jack was studying her face again. "You saw that?" It was half-statement, half-question, as though he thought he knew the answer but couldn't trust his own senses any more. She nodded slowly and his face split into a gentle, relieved grin that seemed to de-aged him by at least five years.

"Well," he said. "That changes everything."

Jack didn't say another word for the next few moments, just stared at something over Jo's shoulder, the fingers of his left hand twiddling and tapping nervously against the table. Jo was just about ready to demand information when the tapping paused and he lifted the first two fingers of his left hand, then curled it into a fist, knuckles still pointed at the ceiling, his thumb folded over on top.

Across the room, one of the patients started screaming. The room erupted into controlled motion, all the aides rushing to the screaming man, the other patients backing away. Jack nodded, a faint smirk on his face. Jo raised her eyebrows and let her eyes trail over in the screaming man's direction.

"That's Steve," Jack said.

"Okay," said Jo.

"He screams."

"So I see."

Jack lowered his hand back to the table. "On command," he said. "Makes a real good distraction."

Jo cocked her head to the side. "And what does he get out of this?"

"I let him win at checkers." Jack leaned his elbows on the table, looking far more at peace with himself now that there was screaming in the background. "So how'd you pull off the doctor bit? You look like you're twelve."

"You look like a real bag of sunshine, too, Princess." Jo matched his gesture with the arms, setting the folder down on the table-top. "Must be treating you real well, here."

Jack twitched. If the movement had been any more obvious, Jo would have called it a flinch. "You know what that was?" he asked, head tilting back towards where Steve was still screaming.

"The demon?"

He nodded, not the firm nod that said 'yes, you're correct,' but a hesitant gesture, one that seemed to represent pieces of a puzzle falling into place. "I thought so. Dad always kept us away from the demon cases, but I could swear --" He shook his head, then simply repeated "I thought so."

Jo sat up a bit at that. "Your father was a hunter?" She'd met countless hunters at the Roadhouse, of course, but they were all more like Uncle Bobby, men and women hardened by tragedy. It was rare to find another who'd been raised to it, the way she was.

"Is," said Jack, his face closing like a garage door. Jo decided to change the subject.

"Right, so, spill. You have a plan for taking this bastard down?"

His shoulders hunched forward, his left hand resuming its tattoo against the table. "Can't even get my hands on a rosary around here, just a cross nailed to the wall. How the hell am I supposed to do an exorcism?"

"So that's why me being here changes things?"

He looked down. "Meant I wasn't hallucinating."

Jo wanted to press, but Steve's screams were starting to taper off. Jack glanced over and pulled his right arm in tight to his chest again. They were out of time.

"Right." Jo picked up the file, tapping it on the table once for emphasis. "Good talk, Jack. I'll check back in with you tonight?"

Jack nodded hurriedly. Out of the corner of her eye, Jo noticed the demon-possessed aide approaching. Jack's fingers tapped a few more times, and for a second, Jo entertained the idea that he was trying to tap in Morse code, but it was too uneven for that. She wondered what it must be like, coming here for help and ending up on the wrong end of one of the sadistic monsters the rest of the world tried to tell you were fake. Even without Jack's protective body language, she'd have to assume it was hell. She counted herself lucky she'd gotten the sense out of him that she had.

As she turned to leave, she noticed that his right hand, tucked into his chest, wasn't exactly inactive. The movements were tiny, and she could only approximate what they might mean, but she recognized the pattern. They were marine hand signals for close combat, a set of codes her father and a few of the other hunters who came through the Roadhouse used. She caught "left", "window", "door", "enemy" and "wedge". She blinked, then put one hand on top of the folder in her other arm and moved it an inch or so side to side.

 _I don't understand._

He frowned hard, then ducked his head. When his hand moved again, it was almost too rapid for her to follow. _0-1-3-0_. She curled her fingers into the "okay" sign against the folder, then made her way out of the day room.

1:30 AM.

He was telling her when to show up.

*

Jo swung in at about 1:15. At night, the dim hallways of the hospital took on a stranger air, the sterile tile hallways reflecting cold blue and eerie red from the emergency lights and exit signs. She'd expected the ward to be loud, maybe filled with the screams of madmen or at least ticking down with rustles of fabric and clicks of heels, but the hallway outside of Jack's assigned room was silent save for her own breathing. She expected to be caught at any moment, and pulled the lab coat, her license to roam freely during the day, tighter around her body. She had no idea if any of the doctors worked at night -- the layout and schedule Ash had sent her didn't cover the night shifts. For all she knew, the stark white coat would just get her spotted faster at this hour.

She found Jack's room easily enough, and had her picks out and ready before she realized that the door didn't lock. She pushed it open, glancing side to side before she entered. She caught sight of a man at the end of the hall she'd just come from, broad-shouldered and tall, though he moved silently. She felt the muscles under her shoulder blades seize up, but his head didn't turn in her direction, and she rolled her shoulders with a silent sigh as he moved on.

It wouldn't occur to her until later that he wasn't wearing either a lab coat, an aide's uniform, or pajamas.

She shut the door carefully behind her, thankful that the hospital kept their hinges well oiled. Still, it closed with a clack that she'd've sworn could wake the dead.

"Jack," she called, several decibels lower than the door had sounded. "It's me."

The body on the bed to the left turned its head, and she could make out Jack's eyes by the faint reflection of the moonlight coming in through a high widow on the right. "Clive," he said. "You're early."

She glanced around the room, but didn't spot any clocks. "How can you tell?"

He grunted. "It's a gift. Now get over here and get me out of these things."

Things?

She crept closer, eyes flicking sideways to the unmoving form of his roommate in the other bed. "We about to have company?"

"He shows up at two," Jack said. He was staring down at his wrists from a prone position and must have missed her glances.

"And your buddy never notices?"

Jack snorted. "Sleeping pills. Good stuff. Seems like these days I'm the only one around here who doesn't get a dose of those with my nightly meds."

"You're probably the only one around throwing them out, too."

"Yeah, I wish." He jerked his arm. "Come on, then."

Jo glanced down and pursed her lips when she saw the leather straps circling both his wrists, and the ones leading up under his blanket near his ankles. "So crazy they had to tie you down, huh?"

"They find you in the hallway with your wrists slit once and they stop letting you get out of bed at night." He lowered his voice, and she got the feeling he spoke his next words as much to himself as to her. "Apparently, I sleepwalk."

Jo nodded, then turned and looked up to the ceiling. She was lucky -- it was solid, not those hole-filled acoustic tiles most public places seemed to prefer. It'd be much easier to get a solid line drawn on painted sheetrock. Jack's bed rattled, and she glanced back.

"What are you doing? Untie me."

Jo shook her head. "It's expecting you to be tied down. We don't want to tip it off."

"You're waiting for it to come here?" The bed rattled harder, but Jo forced herself to ignore it. She took two steps towards the door, digging a Sharpie from her bag, then turned in a slow circle, checking the furniture.

"Don't suppose you've got a chair or something?"

Jack still wrestled with the restraints. "No good. Furniture's all bolted down." _Jerk, rattle rattle._ "I'd give you a boost, but I'm all tied up at the moment."

Jo smirked. "Cute." She headed back to the bed. "I wanted to stick this by the door, but I guess we'll just have to let him get closer."

"Closer to -- son of a bitch!"

Sounded like someone had just clued in.

Jo stepped up onto the bed, her foot a few inches from Jack's head to make sure she wasn't stepping on any limbs. She sidestepped onto the low nightstand, careful around a built-in, currently bulbless bed-side lamp, then pushed up on to her toes. She could just barely reach. It was going to have to be a small one. She uncapped the Sharpie with her teeth and started drawing.

"The hell'd you learn that?" asked Jack. She glanced down, dropping the cap of the Sharpie from her teeth onto his face.

"Devil's trap? Phoned a friend. Now shut up and let me work."

It wasn't the best trap in the world -- Jo had never had the steadiest drawing hand -- but it would have to do. Time was running short, and she still needed to find a hiding spot for when the demon appeared. She hopped down from the night stand, bypassing the bed this time, and grabbed the Sharpie cap from where it had rolled off of Jack's nose. "Right, now just play it cool. Demon gets into that and it'll be powerless. Then we just have to perform the exorcism."

Jack stared at her. "Yeah, I've seen _The Exorcist_ , sweetheart. Not exactly subtle."

"Hunting never is."

He opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the hallway. "He's making rounds. He'll be here in a minute." The bed rattled again, softer this time, and it occurred to Jo that if she were about to face off against a demon while strapped to a bed, she'd probably be trembling, too. Not that she'd mention that to him. Probably get growled at or something. She nodded, stuffing the Sharpie back into her bag, then dropped to the floor and rolled underneath his bed. Other than under his roommate's, it was the only place in the whole room that wasn't out in the open.

A flashlight beam swept across the room, and Jo watched as the bottom of the door -- all she could see from her prone position -- swung open and a pair of sneakered feet made their way inside. Out in the hallway, the footsteps moved off, clapping their way further down the hall and pausing here and there, as though their owner was looking into the various rooms.

There was only one set of footsteps.

The sneakered feet made their way across the small room and stopped in front of the bed, a good foot away from where Jo estimated the edge of the trap would be. She hoped like hell Jack noticed it too, and would draw the thing closer.

"Evening, Dean," a voice said. Jo mouthed the name to herself. She'd figured Jack Campbell was a myth, of course, but it was a bit of a surprise to hear the man's real name whispered aloud by the thing they were there to hunt. "Have fun with your doctor, today?" She could here the irony in its tone and bit her lip. The sucker was going down tonight -- no way was she dealing with it ending up on her tail.

"You just let me get my hands free, you son of a bitch," said Jack -- or rather, Dean. "I'll rip you to shreds."

"That'd be a hell of a thing," the demon said cheerfully. "Wouldn't do you much good, but it might be fun to watch." The feet shifted about six inches closer, and she heard the rustle of a hand reaching into cotton slacks. "You've been good," it said. "That's kind of too bad -- I was hoping to get to try out my knot tying skills."

"Tying what, jackass? We're still on suicide watch, remember?"

"I can be creative. You going to tell me how you managed that trick at the motel, yet?"

"Go to Hell."

"Funny. That's what I thought you'd say."

They stopped talking then, Dean letting out a hissed breath, then the entire bed shook, far harder than the mere rattling from earlier. The demon laughed and shifted closer.

"No time to chat, tonight," it said. "Have to skip straight to your medicine." It shifted again, another few inches, and the springs above Jo's head let out a shriek that bled straight into Dean's shout.

"Jo, now!"

She rolled out from under the far side of the bed, hand whipping into her bag to pull out a bottle of holy water. The demon stared at her, black eyes wide, a bottle of something thick and deep red still poised above Dean's lips. It's eyes shot upward, and she didn't give it time to take in the trap drawn on the ceiling before she threw her holy water at it and hurried to read out the scrawled exorcism.

The demon screamed as the water seemed to boil right off of its skin. Dean shouted and tried to shift sideways on the bed, restraints or no. Across the room, his roommate stirred in his bed, waking up to let out a high-pitched keening. Footsteps thundered in the hallway, and Jo had just a moment to reflect on how royally screwed she'd be if she was caught impersonating a doctor to attack an aide as she continued reading. The demon dropped its vial and backed up, straight into the invisible wall of the trap. It screamed again, curses this time. Something about fathers and brothers and regrets that didn't mean a damn thing to Jo, and by the look on Dean's face, wasn't ringing any bells for him, either. It flailed, striking against the barriers of the trap, right up until Jo shouted the last phrases of the exorcism, when it tilted its head up, pouring black smoke from its mouth to disappear in a flash of flame on the ceiling.

It was astonishing how quiet one man's sobs and another's gasping breath could seem, when compared to the screaming of Hell itself. Dean breathed hard, his eyes screwed shut, arms pulling against the restraints even as the aide, unconscious or dead, collapsed to the floor. The threat now gone, Jo leaned over quickly to unstrap the leather restraints. Dean scrambled out of the bed the instant he was free, running his hand over the tile floor until he picked up the demon's dropped vial. He held it aloft. Outside, the madly running footsteps came closer. Dean whipped his head towards the door, his teeth set, then stared at the vial again. It was empty, save for a thin layer coating the glass. Jo could make out dark stains against the white of the sheets and the floor from where it had spilled, caught a whiff of something metallic. Dean shook the empty glass in his hand once, then flung it hard at the wall and pushed himself into the space between the nightstand and the bed, hands pressed over his hair. Jo scrambled over the bed to check on the aide, just as the door to the room opened and several more piled in.

They must have made quite a scene, really, Dean huddled in a corner on the edge of hyperventilation, his roommate shrieking in his bed, and Jo on the floor with the unconscious -- thank god, only unconscious -- aide. Jo looked up at them, her expression as firm and angry as she could make it, her voice heavy with faked authority. "Well? Get a first aid kit!"

The aides in the doorway exchanged glances, then scattered, one out the door, one to the man still on the bed, one to Jo and the unconscious aide, and one to Dean. Their words were all lost in a faint muttering of calming tones, though Jo caught a desperate glance from Dean over the shoulder of the aide crouched in front of him. She backed up from the one on the floor, groping for her bag.

"You," she said, banking on the idea that a doctor would be too lofty to know all the aides' names. "Help him with this." She didn't specify what "this" was, hoping that the aide would make his own logical assumptions. "I'll take care of Jack."

Dean nodded frantically at the aide and reached for Jo, the perfect picture of panic, a little boy in desperate need of his mommy. Jo really, really hoped he was just that good of an actor. "The Quiet Room, I need the Quiet Room," he said. "Take me to the Quiet Room."

"You'll need help," said the aide, though he backed off when it became clear that Dean was responding to Jo. "Jack can be dangerous."

"Your coworker needs it more," Jo said. She took Dean's hand and helped him to his feet, then pulled him towards the door as fast as she could without running. The aides in the room, perhaps too busy worrying about the unconscious man on the floor, didn't try to follow. Apparently, the situation was enough of an emergency that rules about spending time alone with patients were forgotten. Once in the hallway, Jo let Dean take point, leading the way down and around to a storage room. The man she'd seen earlier was nowhere around.

Dean led her straight to a small, ground level window.

"How'd you know this was here?" Jo asked. Dean gave her a raised brow, now the picture of stability, despite the continued tremble of his hands and the dark circles underlining his eyes.

"I plotted the escape routes as soon as I got in," he said, as though this should be entirely obvious, even as he pulled the sleeve of his t-shirt half off to cover his elbow and smash the glass. "I tried to tell you."

"That marine crap?"

"Hey," Dean smiled as he swung the window open, then pushed himself up and out, reaching back to give her a hand. "That's son-of-a-marine crap to you."

"Yeah, whatever." Once they were out on the grounds, Jo ditched the lab coat and jogged out in front, heading towards her car. "Just one question, Dean."

"Hm?"

"How the hell did you know my name?"

*

"We're in Nebraska," Dean said, the map she kept on the passenger seat pulled open across his knees.

"You didn't even know where you were?"

Dean scowled, not looking up. "My head's a little scrambled right now, okay?" He lowered his voice, and Jo wasn't certain she was supposed to hear what he said next. "Only reason I know the year is 'cause they told me."

Jo tried not to look at him hunched over in the passenger seat, dressed in nothing more than a pair of faded blue scrub pants and a gray t-shirt. They hadn't even had time to grab the belt-less robe.

"Seriously," she said, deciding to skip past the brain scramble bit. "Your family just happen to pull through the Roadhouse sometime, or what?"

"I've been to a lot of freaking roadhouses." He tilted his head against the glass and closed his eyes. She wondered if the cooler temperature felt good, or if the motion of the car was doing bad things to his system. He probably hadn't been outside the hospital in awhile. "Can we just drop it?"

"Sure," she said, though she had no intention of doing so. "What was in the vial that thing tried to give you?"

"That's not dropping it."

"So they're connected."

"How the hell should I know?"

"That demon might have friends who'll come looking for us."

Dean shook his head. "Was a free agent. Liked to babble about how we were oh so alike -- and how lucky it was to nab such a 'meaty prize' to keep all to itself."

"Great. So you're a prize, then. What was that he said about a motel?"

"Damned if I know." He sighed. "Kick me out of your car if you're that worried about it."

Jo shook her head. "And leave you by the side of the road to withdrawal yourself to death? Yeah. Right." She glanced over, giving herself a second to take in his sprawled posture before refocusing on the road ahead. "Or you'd just get caught. We're not that far from the hospital yet. Bet they figure out you're missing within the hour."

She saw him crack an eye open and smirk out of the corner of her eye. "I might attack you."

"Right now I'm thinking I could take you."

The eye closed again. "Yeah. You probably could." He sounded like the thought depressed him. He straightened out a bit with a grunt. "Still, you should test me. When you drop me off. You've got stuff, right?"

"In the back, yeah. But I'm not just dropping you off."

Dean didn't seem to be listening. "Find a motel. I can make my way from there."

Jo glanced over. "You don't even have pockets, dude. I'm betting you don't exactly have a credit card stashed on your person, somewhere."

"I just need a phone. I'll call my dad."

Jo dug into her pocket and pulled out her cell. "Use this. I'd feel a lot better if I could at least hand you off to him."

Dean took the cell and just looked at it.

"Helps if you dial."

"Shut up."

Jo glanced over. "You know his number, right?"

"Yes," Dean said, his teeth pressed together. "Now shut up."

He still didn't dial. Jo frowned down the road as it unspooled in her headlights. "Your dad, he just left you stuck in the loony-bin with a demon and no back up."

He knocked his hand into the window with a thump. "Just fucking drive."

Oh yeah, this guy was totally together.

For the next half hour, Jo drove in silence, her mind whirling with more questions to ask Dean. Had his family always hunted? Did he know the demon was there before he went into the hospital? What had he heard about her, or her family?

Did he know Rick? Did he know where Rick was, now?

He wouldn't answer any of them, not in this mood, so she kept silent.

She pulled up to a red light at a t-junction and looked around. A sign dead ahead indicated the interstate to the left, though they were surrounded on all sides by seemingly endless fields of farmland, the ground low and flat, left fallow for the winter. Dean glanced at the map and said "left," and she nodded, waiting for the light to turn. "Left," he said again, then "Go." She rolled her eyes.

"It's a red light."

"Go," he said, sitting up from his lean against the door panel. His eyes stared out the passenger side window at the field across the road. She followed his glance and spotted a distant form, silhouetted against the deep violet-gray that lingered on the horizon, indicating a distant city.

"It's a scarecrow."

"Go," he said, bracing one hand on the door panel and the other on the dashboard, pushing towards her without taking his eyes off the distant form. She looked down the road to the left, then back to the right.

His paranoia must've rubbed off on her a bit -- that scarecrow looked like it was a little bit closer.

"Left, left, just go go go _go!_ " He reached for the wheel and she batted his hand away, hitting the accelerator and pulling to the left, the jeep swinging out a little as its tires caught on the gravelly asphalt. He spun in his seat to stare behind them, but a glance in the rearview mirror showed only darkness. She waited until they were nearly a mile down the road before speaking.

"What the hell?!"

He turned back, slumping into his seat again, though her glances over showed the tense way he kept scanning the flat horizons. "Sorry," he said. "Just a scarecrow."

"You're really certifiable, aren't you?"

He laughed then, a bright, surprised sound that seemed to shake his whole body, and after a moment, she joined in. As far as tension breaks went, it was lame as hell, but it seemed to help him, and he settled more easily into the passenger seat as they approached the next town.

*

The motel they found only had one double room left, but by that time Jo was reaching the end of her patience with Dean staring at her phone, and Dean looked like he was reaching the end of his endurance, so Jo figured stopping was their best bet. She put it on her credit card and wondered how she'd explain the expense to her mother.

The motel wasn't large, so she didn't bother moving her jeep. She opened up the back to grab her bag, calling the room number up to where Dean still hunched in the passenger seat, staring at her phone. She didn't look to see if he followed as she headed for the room, just let the door hang open behind her as she made a beeline for the bathroom.

She stared at herself in the mirror for a long moment, trying to give him plenty of space. She hadn't packed much for the trip -- she'd learned early how to pack light on personal items and leave lots of room for weapons, and she'd only been planning on being gone at most two nights. If Dean had been Rick, she'd've dragged him back to the Roadhouse, where most of her stuff still lived, anyway. She only kept the bare essentials at school. She brushed her teeth and washed her face, pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail, then grabbed her bag and headed back into the room.

Dean stood in the doorway, looking like he hadn't moved the whole time she'd been in the bathroom.

"What?" she asked. She looked over her shoulder. "There something wrong with the room?"

He glanced over at the two double beds, then back up at her. "Why do you trust me?"

She shrugged. "You're a hunter."

"I'm an escaped mental patient."

She smirked. "A paranoid one, even. Good thing you're kinda pretty." His face, a perfect mixture of indignation and almost prissy outrage, made something bubble up in her chest, and she let her smirk broaden. He opened his mouth to answer, but she broke him off. "Let's just say I'm trusting my instincts. Now, have you called your dad, or do I need to hide in the bathroom a little longer?"

He huffed, hefting her phone in his hand, then pitched it onto the bed furthest from the door, apparently having decided the other one would be his own. "It's disconnected." His shoulders hunched. "Same as it was at the hospital."

She winced, watching him shuffle his way to the bed and sit, picking at the edges of his bandages. "There anyone else you can call?"

He shrugged, not looking over. "Yeah." He grimaced. "Whole bunch of contacts in my phone."

Which he clearly didn't have. "Jesus."

"My car's gone, too," he said, as though she hadn't spoken. Almost as though she wasn't in the room. "All my stuff -- all of it." He glanced over at her. "Everything I had was in that car. Hell, Dad didn't even drive it any more, he had his own truck. What the hell did he do with my car?"

Jo wished she had an answer. All she could do was stare at him a little helplessly.

"Whatever," he said, flopping backwards onto the bed. "You can get going any time. I'll figure something out."

Like hell. She crossed her arms over her chest. "See, and now we're back to 'I'm not letting you die from withdrawal'."

"Right, so we'll, what, go off hunting together?" He gave her a sidelong look from where he lay on the covers, his bare feet still planted on the ground. "Your mom's gonna love that."

Jo froze. The statement by itself could be innocuous enough, if he hadn't said it with such casual authority. He said it the way Uncle Bobby would say it, or Rick or even Gordon Walker. "Okay, seriously." She sat down on the corner of her bed furthest from his, staring at him even as she tried to keep her tone light. "How the hell do you know my mom?"

Dean frowned, turning his gaze back towards the ceiling. "Guess I must've met her at some point."

"You couldn't have been through the Roadhouse more than a couple of times. I'd recognize you." That was bothering her. She couldn't necessarily name all the hunters who came through her mother's bar in the last few years, but she thought she should at least know them on sight. She'd trained better than this.

"Guess you guys must've made an impression."

Jo nodded, looking down at her hands. She made up her mind, then looked back up, her mouth open to offer the Roadhouse as refuge at least until he got his feet back under him -- where Ellen or Ash would probably look at him and go 'oh yeah, came through with his dad a few years ago' and settle the whole deal -- when he spoke again.

"Palo Alto."

She pulled her head back, her nose wrinkling. "That in Texas?"

He snorted. "California. My brother's there."

"In case you haven't noticed, California's kind of on fire, right now."

Dean sat up. "The whole thing?"

Jo shrugged. "About as much as usual. Of course, that's usually just in the summer, but, hey, it's not usually in the upper sixties in Nebraska in November, either."

Dean frowned. "Palo Alto is . . ." His fingers twitched, like he was drawing a map in the air. "Northish. Not far from San Francisco."

Jo shrugged again, and wondered briefly if she should just set herself in permanent shrug mode with this guy. "Then it's probably okay. You think he'll help?"

"Dad's missing." Dean lowered his head. "And I'm screwed. And Sam's my brother." He looked back over, giving her an amused, if tired familial look before letting his eyes wander up and down her frame, the gesture seeming more for form than any real attempt to check her out. "So. Do I get to see you in your skimpy nightie or something?"

She scoffed and rolled her eyes. "I don't trust you that much." She hopped up, turning her back on him as she reached under her shirt to pull off her bra. It wouldn't be the first time she'd slept in her jeans. "Besides," she said, adopting a stuffy, self-important tone. "I'm a taken woman."

"It's official," Dean's voice floated up behind her, lightly teasing, though laced with an undertone of miserable truth. "I'm the unluckiest bastard alive."

*

Jo was up and about well before Dean, his twitches, shivers and moans driving her out of the room by about five AM. She wasn't doing anyone any good lying around not falling asleep, certainly not Dean, who was either having a nightmare or dreaming himself to a raging hard-on, and there were things to do before either of them could in good conscience get out of there. She scribbled a note on a piece of motel stationery and slipped out the door, returning an hour later, loaded down with a spectacularly heavy collection of torn plastic bags emitting a variety of interesting -- and kind of horrible -- smells. Dean wasn't in his bed any more, and for just a moment she thought he'd ducked out while she was busy and imagined trying to track his barefoot ass down on the streets of Nowhereville -- or hearing about the escaped psycho the police had picked up on the morning news. Then she realized she could hear him in the bathroom.

She scowled, pulling back towards the funk of her bags, then dropped them and strode across the room to the bathroom door.

He'd left it cracked open.

 _Lovely_.

She ducked her head and peeked through, not in the least bit surprised to find him on the floor, half curled around the toilet. She smirked. She'd spent too long bar-side to have any sort of sympathetic gag reflex. "Still thinking you'll be fine on your own?"

Dean didn't look up from the toilet bowl when he flipped her off. She grinned. "Come out when you're done. I've got something for ya."

She ducked back out of the doorway before he could answer, which considering the renewed volume of his heaving was probably a good idea. She couldn't be certain, but she was pretty sure he was being louder on purpose, the jackass. Well, either way, it gave her plenty of time to sort through her morning's conquests.

When Dean finally dragged himself back out of the bathroom, the sun was hovering above the horizon, and Jo was despairing for the state of humanity.

People donated the worst clothes to charity.

"The hell?" Dean's voice was completely wrecked, but he'd clearly made an effort to rinse his mouth out and wash up a little before coming out. He looked even worse than he had at the hospital, paler and puffier, with darker bags under his eyes. Still, he'd gotten more sleep than she had. He picked up a t-shirt with the logo from some county fair on the front, stuck his face in it, then drew back looking horrified.

"I found you some boots," Jo said, pointing to a battered-but-still-workable pair sitting at the foot of his bed.

"Where'd you get this crap?"

"Good Will box across the street."

Dean's face actually brightened at that, and he gave Jo a sort of half smile that transformed into a smart-ass smirk when he looked back at the t-shirt and tossed it onto a pile. "You shoulda hit up a local church. Their stuff tends to be cleaner."

"So we'll find a laundromat." Jo held up a pair of jeans and frowned at the inner seam at the crotch. They were practically worn through. "I had to guess at your size."

"Didn't guess too hard." Dean kicked at another pile -- her maybes, unfortunately. "You grabbed everything in the box, didn't you?"

"You wanted me to sort through it on the street?"

Dean flopped onto her bed -- it was further from the mass of old B.O. and cigarette smoke that was her mound of second-hand clothes -- and ran a hand down his face. She realized he was still trembling faintly.

"You don't have to do this. You should get going."

Jo threw a pair of socks at him. He lifted his hand, but not quite in time to keep them from bouncing off his forehead.

"Either help out or go back to playing in the bathroom."

Dean chose to help, though he wasn't much good, considering how often he'd pause and swallow, or shake out his fingers, or just stare off into the middle distance until she threw something at him again. Over all, it was a little bit better than she expected, withdrawal-wise. She'd kind of figured on a couple days stuck inside with a shivering, sweaty wreck. He had the shivering and sweating down, but he was clearly making a hell of an effort to be functional. Whatever they'd had him on, it looked like it'd been fairly gentle, at least.

Maybe they wouldn't get stuck here for too long.

They both crashed out early that night, after a surprisingly uneventful trip to the laundromat with the armful of approved used clothes, then a trip back to the Good Will box to redonate the rejected stuff. Dean still spent the night twitchy and huffy, but Jo was too tired to care. She woke only once, to see him sitting up in bed, but when she called his name and he answered something that sounded like "Alice there," or maybe "all the stairs", she remembered his comment about sleepwalking. She watched him sleepily for a few minutes, but he did little more than wander to the bathroom and back muttering before stretching out on the bed again, and she went back to sleep.

The morning saw Dean crouched back over the toilet letting out the occasional low pitched whine, and this time, Jo spent her time waiting on the computer.

"We should swing through Colorado on our way to California," she called, when it seemed like the heaves and thumps were dying down.

Dean grunted something that seemed to be half choke and half query.

"I'm doing some research," Jo said. "There's a town out in the mountains, had a whole slew of missing persons."

The next sound he made was definitely a question, though it was no more intelligible.

"Blackwater Ridge?" Jo offered. "Missing hikers. Whatever it is has wiped out an entire family."

Dean leaned out of the bathroom then, bleary-eyed but focused. "Wendigo," he said. "Taken care of."

Jo raised her eyebrows at him. "How do you know?"

"My brother and I took care of it." Dean shrugged, then went for one of the plastic cups and some water. "Almost landed a hot chick." He frowned, eyes on the wall as he dipped into the memory. "One of her brothers got nabbed."

Jo looked back at her screen, clicking between a couple screens, then hit a link for a picture. "Hayley?" she guessed. Dean nodded.

"Yeah." He drained his glass of water, then snapped his fingers. "Man, if we hadn't gotten roughed up, I totally would've sealed that deal."

Jo turned her computer around. "This her?"

Dean looked over and frowned, stepping closer. He nodded.

"Dean, she's one of the ones who went missing. Along with her other brother and the guide they hired to take them out and look for the first one."

Dean shook his head. "No. I mean, yeah, Roy got ganked, but she and her brothers were fine."

"When did you do this?"

He frowned again, then reached up to rub the back of his neck. "I -- shit." He shook his head. "I don't know. Recently?" Another head shake, and the hand moved to press against his mouth. His skin dropped at least another shade of color, and he hurried back into the bathroom. This time, Jo got up to follow.

"Dean," she said. "If you and your brother didn't finish the job --"

Dean sat up at the toilet, his arms braced on the rim. He looked over at her, his expression grim.

"My brother's been in school for three years," he said. He swallowed hard. "There's no way we could have done that hunt." He stared up at her, like he was hoping she'd somehow have all the answers. "I. I must've dreamed it."

Jo looked right back, meeting him gaze for gaze, her hand tightening on the door. "You've never been to my mom's roadhouse, have you?"

Dean hunched back over the toilet bowl, his eyes closing. Jo waited, but all he did was swallow a few times, then spit.

"Dean," she said again, pausing when he looked up. She had to choose her words carefully or he might run off. "I think maybe you're psychic."

 **RUBY**

Sam woke with a gasp, his eyes flying open. It'd been a week since they left Palo Alto, a week of relentless, aimless driving, and every time he'd gone to sleep -- which wasn't that often -- he woke the same way. Ruby looked up at him from her chair in the corner, where she'd been sitting since he finally gave in to the pull of his eyelids.

Really, the things she did to earn a guy's trust.

She waited while he stared up at the ceiling, his chest heaving. She waited while he caught his breath, waited until his eyes finally focused and he started looking around. She waited until his eyes landed on her, then stood up and went to the sink, filled a glass with water, and grabbed a bottle of painkillers. He took them without giving her that sideways look, and she felt a smile welling up inside which she didn't allow to cross her lips.

This was progress.

"Sam?" she asked. "You okay?"

He shook his head and tossed back the pills, then watched her while he chugged the water. She held his gaze, pulling his borrowed shirt tighter around her body. He looked her up and down, then let his gaze travel back to the walls of the gaudy motel room, across and down and finally up, back to the ceiling. He sighed, then rolled over onto his stomach.

"No."

She sifted through a list of phrases in her head, the sorts of things she knew a person would ask, looking for the one that fit the situation, that said "I care" in the gentlest of ways. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Sam pressed his face into the pillow, then lifted his forehead just enough to be able to peer over its folds at her. She looked back, careful not to move any closer, but refusing to move away. Jess' instincts demanded that she grab hold of him and never let go, and she found herself actually having to fight them. Sam's tastes apparently ran to strong-willed women.

Which, fighting a dead host aside, suited her just fine.

Sam rolled his head to the side just enough to reveal his mouth. "He basically raised me."

Ruby briefly considered not knowing who he was talking about, but dismissed it as disingenuous. "It's okay to miss him."

He shook his head. "I dreamed --" He cut himself off, pushing up onto his elbow and pressing the heal of his hand into his forehead. He made it all the way to sitting like that, and though it brought his head within inches of her own, Ruby still didn't pull away. "I saw the fire. In the apartment."

Ruby nodded carefully. Jess' memories said she should put her hand on him, then, but she held back. She'd promised not to lie to him, and maybe it wasn't the same as telling him the whole truth, but if she wanted him to trust her, she had to keep the line between dead girlfriend and new ally clear until he decided to blur it.

He brushed his hand up, through his hair, pushing his bangs off his face, and peered at her. The painkillers hadn't made a dent in his hangover, yet. She decided next time she would slip just a little bit of witchcraft into his glass of water. It wouldn't do either of them any good if the alcohol wore him down too far. "I dreamed it. For weeks before it happened."

She nodded again. There'd been no guarantees as to what power he would manifest first, but passive dreaming wasn't much of a surprise. Not quite as useful as mind control or telekinesis, maybe, but not a surprise.

He noticed. "You knew."

She shrugged. "Not exactly. But it's not a surprise. You've always been different, Sam. That's why the demon wanted you in the first place." She tilted her head. "You're still dreaming. Not right this instant, but you just woke up from one, right?"

His hand came back up to his face, and this time the other one joined it. He pressed his elbows into his knees, fingers tangled in his bangs. "Yeah." He dropped his hands, staring at them in his lap, then looked up at her. "He's not dead."

That one was a surprise. "Sam --"

He shook his head, one sharp movement cutting her off almost mid-word. "He's not." He pushed to his feet, wavering a little as he stalked over to the sink and refilled his water glass.

"Sam," she tried again. "I'm sorry --"

He put up one hand, and she could see in his reflection that he'd closed his eyes. "Don't. I know what I'm talking about."

"How?"

He took the time to drink his second glass more slowly before answering, turning in a slow circle to look at her again. "I dreamed about --" he waved his hand in a circle in her general direction, eyes lifting to stare over her shoulder before dropping back to her face. "-- for weeks. I never dreamed about him."

Something inside Ruby which had sat tense and ready dropped back into relaxation. "Sam."

"That's not all." He set his glass down noisily on the counter and placed his hands on either side of his hips. "I see him every night. He's lost, and he's hurt, and he's confused. But he's alive."

Ruby frowned and shook her head. "That's not possible. I'm sorry, Sam, but it's --"

"It's true," he finished, taking the words right from her mouth, though he meant his in a different way. "It's some kind of institution. White walls and white floors and white scrubs and a giant man with red medicine he forces down Dean's throat. He's helpless. They keep him --" He dropped his gaze again, this time looking at his feet. "He's drugged. He doesn't think -- he's not even sure he's real, any more, but he's waiting for me. We have to find him."

Ruby stood, taking the initiative to cross the room over to him. This was an unforeseen result of his grief, and had the potential to set them back years in his development. The fact that she'd clawed her way out of Hell as soon as she had told her they didn't have years. She was lucky if they had months, and Sam still had a long way to come before he was ready to raise her master. She had to push the envelope a little. "Sam. Look at me."

He looked up from the floor, tensing when he saw her as close as she was, but not pulling away. She smiled, as soft and as sympathetic as Jess' features allowed.

"I believe you," she said, and the surprise in his expression echoed her own that that was what came out. She must have been letting Jess bleed through. Still, she could work with it. "But your gifts -- they're going to take some getting used to. Some careful reading. Refining."

He nodded so eagerly that she had to stop her smile from turning victorious. "I can't hone in on where he is, yet. I'm trying, but it's all too --"

She lifted her hand in a silent request, and when he stopped talking she brought it up, letting it hover near his cheek without actually touching. "We can talk to Mr. Singer," she said. "Your dad said he was there, right? That he saw what happened?"

"Bobby," said Sam, and his forehead wrinkled. She could see the way the bits started to shift into place behind his eyes. "You think maybe Dad lied?"

Ruby huffed, treading the line of truth and lies carefully, weighing her options before deciding that she could use his doubts as a step towards gaining his complete trust. This was even an area she could use the remnants of Jess in -- the girl hadn't been certain of John's motives, either, though she leaned more towards the 'Sam's dad is nuts' end of the equation. "I wouldn't put it past him."

Sam nodded eagerly again, his whole being brightening at the hope that threaded through the statement, and part of her hated having to bring that out of him only to squash it back down when Bobby confirmed John's story. Dean was dead -- she might not have been there to do it, herself, but it was just about the only thing her brethren would talk about in the days between the fire at the motel and the fire at the apartment. Dean Winchester, thorn in the side of supernatural forces everywhere, brought down and destroyed and with him, the whole Winchester family. The keystone removed to bring John and Sam crumbling to their knees, all set to bring out her master and flood the Earth with all the creatures kept under lock and key for centuries.

It was a hell of a thing, that death. And a long time coming.

"We'll talk to Bobby," Sam said, and a ghost of a smile appeared on his face, the first she'd seen in person. It was impossible to avoid smiling back, but she bit her lip to keep seeming too enthusiastic.

"But Sam -- I don't want you to get your hopes up, okay? If Bobby confirms your dad's story. . . ."

The smile vanished. "He won't."

"But if he does." Her entire agenda could hinge on his answer to this question, but she kept her tone sympathetic, rather than hopeful. "What are you going to do, then?"

Sam's jaw hardened, changing the shape of his whole face. "Then I'm going to kill the son of a bitch responsible."

She didn't try to hide her smile this time, letting her fingers brush just barely over his cheek. "I know you will." And in doing so, he'd finally discover his real strength.

And then, oh then. There'd be Hell to pay.

*

After getting the truth from Bobby, Sam crawled his way to the bottom of a bottle and didn't reemerge for more than a week. Ruby wondered if she'd managed to lose him for good and imagined of all the devious tortures Lilith and Alastair would dream up for her punishment. What little word she'd managed to get from below already had them ranting -- an exorcised demon, one of Azazel's little 'family', had returned to the pit raving about having Dean Winchester clutched in her nasty little claws, that he was alive, a danger, and holding some crazy bag of tricks up his sleeves. Ruby knew as well as any that it wasn't possible, that Dean had burned to a crisp on a ceiling, just like his dear little mother. She had no idea what Azazel's brat was up to, spreading those lies, but it just made her own job all the more important. The demons were divided when they ought to be standing strong, and Sam was the key to bringing back the one who could finally unite them.

Traitorous thoughts crept into her head, wondering if just maybe the prophesies were wrong, if she should be focusing on one of Azazel's other little projects, the twins in Oklahoma or maybe the girl in Illinois, but she banished them all when Sam finally set the bottle aside and refocused on her, looking almost surprised to see her still in the room.

"You done?" she asked.

Sam nodded slowly, ponderously, and pushed himself swaying to his feet. "Yeah."

"Good." And she took every single bottle she could find in the motel and the Thunderbird, took them all down to a nearby field, and let him watch as she poured the leftover liquor out on the ground. She could easily have used the sink, but getting him out of the motel room and getting him moving was as important as getting rid of the temptation of the alcohol. She offered to let him pour out the last of the bottles, but he shook his head and she didn't push. He was letting her call the shots just now, but if she wasn't careful, he'd try to take back control.

Sam in control wasn't part of the plan. She only needed him to believe he was.

She upended the last of the bottles over the soil, turning her head to watch him over her shoulder. "We've got things to do. I need to know if you're going to be with me."

He watched the rivulets of alcohol run between blades of fried grass, eking their way over loose dirt and into a dried up creek bed. Fifty miles south and maybe a couple hundred feet closer to sea level, three small towns had been all but wiped off the map thanks to storms and flash flooding. She didn't have much time.

"I never wanted this for you," he said, and she couldn't hold back a twitch of surprise.

Her life just got more complicated.

"What?"

"I was gonna propose, you know?"

She took a breath. "Sam --"

He shook his head. "Forget it, Jess." He toed at one of the bottles on the ground. "We should go."

She gaped at him for a moment, then snapped her mouth shut and ground her teeth together once, collecting herself. "Sam --"

A wind caught her back, sending the bottle at Sam's feet rolling and rattling the Thunderbird on its busted up shocks. She could feel the wall of reality that held back the legions of Hell quiver between her ribs.

She didn't have much time.

She smiled, threading her fingers through his. This looked bad on paper, but she thought she could work with it. He'd loved Jess. She could use that love. She delved into the leftover personality she'd been working so hard to hold back the last couple of weeks, and it still wasn't entirely a lie when she replied: "I would have said yes."

He smiled back, the expression tainted by the grief that still lingered over everything they did, tinged with the traces of madness. With hundreds of years between herself and her human life, grief was almost a foreign concept, but madness she knew. Madness could be molded.

"Sam," she said. "Are you still having the dreams?"

He shook his head. "No. He's really gone, now."

She nodded, satisfaction welling within her, and tugged him towards the car. She dug through Jess' memories, looking for the perfect smile, the perfect tone.

"Come on," she said. "There's still a lot to do to get you ready."

*

They avoided the coasts. Southern California seemed to have caught fire almost as soon as they'd left the state -- every time fire crews seemed close to putting them out, the Santa Ana winds would change direction, spreading them somewhere new. The Gulf, all but devastated at the end of the summer, continued to receive hit after hit by tropical storms and flood warnings. The Mississippi Delta was hanging on by threads, with Houston and Miami faring little better. Electrical storms raged almost nightly over the mid-Atlantic and New England, not that it'd be easy to get over to the Eastern seaboard by car, these days. The Great Smokies had all but disappeared into their own "smoke", which had expanded to cover most of the Appalachian range. Even the Great Lakes had swelled their ranks, and depending on where you went, the Mississippi itself was either a raging torrent or a bare trickle. Ruby could feel the rejoicing of her brethren nightly as more and more slipped through the widening cracks of reality, reveling in the confusion left in the wake of the natural disasters.

She longed to join them, but not being able to, reveled instead in destroying them. Sam took to the knifework like an old pro though mental exorcisms still gave him nosebleeds and migraines, and the demons seemed to be just lining up to be sent back to Hell by the great Boy King. Most of them slipped right back out into the world, anyway.

Then, in Merrillville, Indiana, not far from the new coast of Lake Michigan, it all nearly came crashing down around her head.

They'd run into a nest, all gathered together around the crest of fear and pain washed south with the expanding lake, a chaotic little band of low-lifes who'd barely qualified to come down off the racks in Hell. It was almost a game, taking them out, a dance of blood and fire as Ruby and Sam worked in tandem, she with her knife and he with his ever growing power. Ruby'd been too high on the joy of the carnage to notice just who was leading the bastards until she'd jammed her knife into the second-to-last one and turned, grinning through blood-stained teeth, to see Sam standing grim faced over a body in the corner.

The demon had taken a pretty little host, around Sam's age, petite and blonde with a pixie cut and a sharp face, lips curling so naturally it seemed the expression might have been there since birth. Sam rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck, mouth set to a grimace as he lifted his hand, and though Ruby recognized the demon with little more than a glance, she couldn't get between them in time to stop her from speaking.

"Sam Winchester. You know, for all the talk, I never really thought you had it in you."

It was Azazel's daughter, the traitor who claimed to have had Dean in her clutches even after his timely demise.

"Sam." Ruby stepped up next to him, knife at the ready, but he blocked her path with his free hand.

"I got this one."

Azazel's girl twisted her head to peer at Ruby almost sideways. "You heard the man," she said, her tone amused. "He's got me." She looked back up at Sam. "Who's your friend? We haven't been properly introduced."

Ruby imagined what the little bitch would look like with her knife sticking out from between her eyes, went so far as to even lift her arm for the throw, but Sam caught her wrist.

"I said I've got it." His voice was strained and his hand shook as a fresh drop of blood appeared at his nostril, but his eyes were narrowed, determined, and part of Ruby, perhaps influenced by the remains of Jess, didn't want to take this potential victory from him. She hesitated.

It was all the other demon needed.

"Just what would your father think of you now, Sam?" she asked. "What would your brother think?" She smiled slow, her chin lowered as she peered up at him through her eyelashes. "He says 'hi', by the way. Shacked up with his own little blond. Must run in the family, huh?"

Sam's hand wavered further. "What the hell do you know about my brother?"

Ruby shook her head sharply, jerking her wrist in Sam's grip, trying to get enough freedom to throw the knife. Sam's hand was firm, though, even tired as he was, and her place in his life was still too tenuous to risk hurting him. "You don't ask them _questions_ , Sam! She's playing you!"

The irony was not lost on Azazel's girl. She gasped in feigned shock and gave Ruby a hurt look. "I'm only telling him the truth. Surely _you_ must understand."

Sam's concentration broke and he glanced over at Ruby. "What's she talking about?"

"Nothing!" Ruby jerked her wrist again, fighting back rising panic. "She's trying to turn you against me. You're too tired, Sam. You've worked hard enough, tonight. Let me take care of this one."

Sam looked back at Azazel's girl, his look of determination wavering. "You knew Dean."

"Oh." The demon grinned and held up two crossed fingers. "We were like _this_."

Sam's eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed, and Ruby crowed inwardly as he let go of her hand and she was finally able to let the knife fly. It crashed into Azazel's daughter's face with the force only a demon could muster, landing dead center between her eyes and knocking her head back sharp against the wall. Her entire skull lit up orange and blue, her eyes wide, and she toppled sideways.

Ruby resisted the urge to kick the body.

Sam dropped his hands to his sides. "She was there, wasn't she?" He stared down at the body, his whole frame trembling as the events of the night began to catch up with him. "Was she the one who --"

Ruby set her hand on his shoulder. "She was lying, Sam. Maybe she was there, or maybe she helped, but she's not the one who killed your brother." She took a breath, then stepped forward to retrieve her knife. "If she was, I would have let you take the shot."

Sam quivered once more before the tension left his body in a rush. He pulled her into a hug as she straightened, the first time he'd initiated contact since the night outside his burning apartment building, and she shut her eyes for a moment to revel in the sensation of being held by a man she'd come to respect, even as she dismantled and reshaped him.

Things like that just didn't happen to her.

He pulled away just far enough to look her in the eyes, the lines of tension and pain cleared momentarily from his face, and he looked so agonizingly, eternally young in a way she could no longer remember ever being. It astonished her, then, that a boy like him could be the key to everything she'd dreamed of since she'd first thrown her lot in with the demons so long ago. Sam would free Lucifer -- more than that, he would _become_ him -- and Ruby could not think of a more perfect vessel.

Through Sam, Lucifer would gain his rightful place in the world. And she would stand so tall beside him.

"Thank you," Sam said, and Ruby smiled up at him with all the joy and light that still dwelt within Jess' body.

"You're welcome."

*

Ruby had no idea how Sam reconciled the face of his dead girlfriend with the coaching on demonic behavior. By Christmas, the madness she'd spotted that day by the creek bed had bled into every angle of his body, and she didn't question its presence. They never spoke of Stanford, mentioned John only in passing, and even then, he blended freely with Azazel to take on responsibility for Dean's death. And Dean. . . .

Dean had grown to epic proportions. To listen to Sam talk, the sun rose because Dean decided to fart it out his ass. Dean had become his religion, and Ruby had been around long enough to understand the power inherent in that idea and the lengths it could drive Sam to. She herself had been granted almost as important a status, an assistant in the holy war to bring down the killer of Sam's personal Jesus. Or, rather, Jess had, but by that time, Ruby and Jess were one, the original, naive, wickedly innocent woman blended neatly with the intelligent, self-possessed, and above all _knowledgeable_ demonic witch. It seemed only natural that she used midnight December 25th as the time to bring Sam to the next level.

Sam had never ordered two queens when they stopped at motels. And Ruby had graduated from her chair in the corner the night after taking out the nest in Merrillville. The moments they had between the sheets were both when Sam showed the most sanity and the least grip on reality. In those moments of pleasure, the grief that clouded over his gaze seemed to lift, and Ruby could swear he almost saw her for what she really was. The most ecstatic she'd ever felt involved straddling him there, staring down into his eyes as he acknowledged her for the vicious creature she was and accepted her, accepted her lessons and begged her with his gaze to bring him to the same level.

Sometimes, she could almost believe that he'd forgotten his brother entirely. Sometimes.

She'd brought the knife into play a time or two before, but never broke the skin when she glided its blade along his neck and chest, or across her own breasts. Tonight that changed. She brought the knife to bear on her arm, watching Sam's eyes as he watched her blood well to the surface.

"You need this, baby," she said.

"I don't --"

She silenced him with a kiss, pressing her hips harder into his. "We're so close. You're almost ready."

Mania reignited in his eyes and he licked his lips, but she could still see a creeping doubt.

"Do you trust me?"

He didn't hesitate. "Yes."

She nodded, elated, and brought her bloody wrist to his mouth. He pressed his lips together, and she watched the war in his eyes closely. "Do you trust me?" she asked again, the words barely a sigh passing between her lips.

He latched onto her arm and heat swelled beneath her belly.

Time was growing so short, but her player was in place.

They'd be ready.


	3. Book Two

_. . . just awhile ago there occurred to me that there must have been  
someone else on that road with me, some strange character yet unheard of,   
like I told you, can't remember, and ‘you know that dream of yours about being   
pursued across a white desert by a shrouded stranger in a hood, with a stave   
of shining gold, terrible feet, clouds for knees, and a   
black face in snow cowls. . . ._  
\-- Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1960)

 **BOOK TWO**

 **CASTIEL**

His vision cleared to a dark road. Hard rain spattered against the pavement. He saw no indicators of time or place other than "night" and "not desert", and the lack of context threw him almost as hard as the journey did. Still, there were things he had to do, and four years was easier than thirty, so he turned in place, scanning the horizon. Someone would be nearby.

He spotted a figure some distance away, all but invisible to human sight. It stood at the side of the road, dwarfed under the arcing branches of old, withering trees, a coat squaring off the shape of its hips, an umbrella seeming to hover above its head. It brightened as he watched, squinting through the rain, until he could just make out the color of its shirt, the almost animal glint of light against its eyes.

A horn blared and he turned again. Two lights, impossibly bright, illuminated the individual raindrops as they pounded down onto the asphalt. Something struck him, low and hard at the knees, tilting his body forward. He over-corrected back and landed with a _splat_ just barely audible over the white noise of tires on the wet road, his head bouncing once against the pavement.

Four years or thirty, without Heaven's aid time travel could not be done gracefully. Castiel had a moment of clarity to reflect on this before the twin blaring lights faded before his eyes and he sunk backward into the black pavement.

*

Though neither motion or vision were within his reach, Castiel could smell old smoke and hear the sounds of a door slamming. Heavy footsteps came forward, and two voices mumbled something indecipherable at each other.

That was a surprise. Angels did not suffer the curse of Babel -- any words formed in any language should have immediately apparent meaning, even if modern phrases, references, and slang terms still eluded him. He should be able to make something out, but the effort of time travel had drained both himself and his vessel to the point of incapacitation.

This wouldn't do. There was work to be done.

He dug deep inside himself, to the very source of his grace, the same unflagging power that allowed him to travel through time without the will of Heaven in the first place. Where normally he would liken it to the sun, bold, bright, and eternal, it reminded him now more of the smoldering ember of a fire, glowing on the underside of a log, awaiting tinder and a well placed influx of air to reignite it. A misstep, it seemed, and it would go out.

That was foolish. Angels didn't "go out". With patience and guidance -- what humanity might call "prayer" or "meditation" -- Castiel grasped hold of that inner ember and forced it to brighten, just a little, just enough to make out words.

"He dented a _Jeep_."

He knew that voice, and it did him good to hear it, though it wasn't one he expected. The one that followed sent a flare of relief through his frame that brightened the glow of his grace considerably.

"I know, okay? Just -- I know him."

 _Dean._ And Jo, apparently, alive and well. Though he knew that she and her mother gave their lives willingly and proudly and their sacrifices proved their good and pure natures, his vessel's human heart seemed to swell at the sound of it. She was alive. And yelling at Dean.

"Yeah? He want you dead, too?"

Well. That was concerning.

"I don't know, okay?" He could hear Dean begin to pace, footsteps muffled by harsh fibers -- a carpet, he realized. In the small room surrounding the bed he himself appeared to be laying on, all of it saturated with the smell of smoke and the lingering traces of tragedy. That was right enough, or at least not uncommon, but there were only two voices in the room and Sam -- Sam was not there.

That was wrong. Dean would not willingly go where Sam could not follow.

Something was very wrong.

"Hey," said Jo. Dean's footsteps paused. "Talk to me. Who is this guy?"

"He's --" The pacing resumed. "I just know him, okay?"

"Like you 'just knew' me?"

Castiel frowned inwardly as they spoke, words tumbling out at impressive speeds for humans. Low and rushed and hoarse, like they were trying to keep from waking him up. If Dean truly knew him, then he would likely know better. Wouldn't he?

He forced his eyes open. "Dean," he said.

Dean's face appeared above his own, followed by Jo's in a swarm of pale yellow hair. A shotgun barrel followed her, and for a moment, it was all Castiel could focus on. Dean pushed it away with a sideways glare at Jo. Jo glared back.

"Castiel?" said Dean, as though he'd never tried to form the name aloud before.

Dean and Jo were together, with no sign of Sam. Dean knew Castiel -- sort of -- but Jo did not. Both were clearly of age and competent within themselves.

There was only one conclusion to be drawn.

"Dean," Castiel said again, acknowledging his own name. He glanced at Jo. "I think I missed."

By the looks on their faces, they had no idea what he was talking about. But he couldn't study those expressions for very long, as a wave of exhaustion swelled beneath his tiny fire, scattering the embers, and with time only to hear one last comment from Jo, it washed him back down into the darkness.

"You have the weirdest friends."

*

Castiel's return to consciousness this time was less of a gradual relighting of a smoldering fire and more of an explosion of light and sound. He shot upright on the bed, comatose to conscious in a matter of moments, to the sound of a gasp -- not his own -- and a shotgun cocking -- not the gasper's. Jo and Dean stared at him from a table on the other side of the room, Jo's hands clenched on a laptop as though she were about to throw it -- probably at him -- and Dean's shotgun primed and aimed at Castiel's head. Dean stared a moment longer, then lowered the gun and tucked it away.

"Dude. Don't do that."

Castiel raised his hands at his sides in what he hoped was an appropriately apologetic gesture. Jimmy's coat, jacket, and tie had been removed, making his arms feel strangely light and unrestricted. Or perhaps that was a side effect of the reawakening of his grace. Castiel had only experienced that level of dampening of his spirit once before, and couldn't recall much regarding any side effects of the travel to 1978 and back. "I apologize," he said. He looked at Jo, tilting his head to study her closer, despite the way it made her lips harden and her eyes narrow. It was difficult for him to judge the aging process of mortals -- they all seemed to wither and die so quickly -- but he thought perhaps she looked younger than when he had met her and her mother, lighter, somehow, as though the process of hunting had not yet colored in patches of her soul. Dean, as ever, remained a dark, blank spot when scrutinized in such a way, and Castiel avoided doing it.

There was still someone missing. "Where's Sam?"

Dean looked away, and Jo let go of the laptop and stood, putting much more force into her movements than they ought to have required. She paced to Castiel's right, around the bed, but rather than approach, she continued on towards a small alcove he recognized from any number of motels he'd visited Dean in. There was a sink there, and a mirror, and she paused in front of it, smirking at her reflection, before bending over to fill a plastic glass with water from a jug by the sink. He watched her patiently, awaiting an answer, as she gave the glass a long look, then turned her back on the mirror and leaned her weight against the counter. "That's the question of the goddamn year."

Castiel looked back at Dean. Dean seemed intent on the forestock of his shotgun. Castiel frowned. He seemed to have missed by a lot. "You've defeated War," he said. "Has Zachariah not yet visited?" He'd rather thought he'd been with Dean for most of his time away from Sam after River Pass, but he could well be mistaken.

Dean looked up from his shotgun and smirked. "Yeah, I don't know what any of that means, thanks." He flicked the safety back and forth a few times with his left hand, then set the gun back on the table -- though Castiel didn't miss the fact that it was still aimed at him. "So let's get the facts out of the way. What are you, how do I know your name, and most importantly, what the hell do you want with my brother?"

Castiel glanced over at Jo, who stood by the sink with her arms crossed, half a glass of water still clutched in her hand. She smirked again. "Don't look at me. I've never heard of you."

Dean brought his attention back over with a knock to the table. "Less looky more talky, Chuckles. Or I might have to test my theory about this thing working on you."

Castiel frowned at the gun. "It won't," he said. "Besides which, it's loaded with rock salt." Dean twitched, but gave no other outward sign that Castiel was right. "You usually call me 'Cass'."

"Dated a girl named 'Cass' once," Dean said. "You don't look anything like her."

Castiel looked back at Jo, ignoring Dean's irrelevant remarks as per usual. "That will not have an effect on me, either," he said.

Jo's eyes flicked to Dean, then back to Castiel. She shifted against the counter, her legs tensed to lunge forward at the slightest provocation. "It's water," she said.

"Made holy," said Castiel. "At most I might find it refreshing."

Dean called his attention back again, this time by picking up the shotgun, no longer pretending to leave it idle. It was his left hand on the trigger, Castiel noted, despite the fact that he more typically used the right. "What are you?"

Castiel stared at him again. They'd done all this before -- if Dean knew his name, then they must certainly be from some time after Castiel raised him from Perdition.

Outside the motel room, a hard wind pressed over a hollow space, making a howling noise. Rain battered against the window.

"What's the year?" asked Castiel.

"What are you?" asked Dean.

"I'm an angel of the Lord. What's the year?"

"Bullshit." Dean stood, and Jo made her way over from the sink, pulling a small iron knife from the back of her jeans to go with her holy water. "What are you?"

"I don't have the time or energy to waste on demonstrations." Castiel didn't often raise his voice, but he could feel his tone deepening into a frustrated growl. "I was aiming for 2006, now what year is this?"

Dean glanced at Jo. She shrugged minutely. Dean looked back.

"It's 2006."

Thunder rattled the ducts on the roof.

Something was very, very wrong.

"Where is Sam?"

*

"So let me get this straight." Dean sat behind the wheel of the now-dented jeep, his eyes flicking rapidly from the road in front of them -- blurred by rain the windshield wipers barely managed to keep up with -- to the rearview mirror. Castiel held his gaze whenever he looked back. Jo sat in the passenger seat, looking twitchy. "I'm supposed to be on the road with my brother, right now?"

"Hey," said Jo, hands tight on the dashboard. "If you gonna be chatty, maybe I should drive?"

Dean's gaze flicked to her, this time. "Last time you drove, you ran over an angel, and we ended up holed up in a burned out motel for three days."

"He appeared out of nowhere!"

"And now the car's dented!"

"You said the engine block was fine."

"It's still dented."

"I can simply move us all there," Castiel said, pitching his voice carefully above the din of their bickering. He was long on patience as a rule, but the constant argument between the two was beginning to sorely try it. "It would be much faster."

Jo twisted in her seat to glare at him. "We're not ditching my car."

"It's not yours," Castiel pointed out. "It belongs to your mother."

"Oh, so you're taking her side now, too?"

Really, Castiel had no idea how humans ever accomplished anything.

"We're keeping the car," Dean said, as usual assuming that his word on any subject would be the final one. "And I'm driving it."

Jo turned back to the front, arms firmly crossed over her chest. "Fine. Then we're listening to my music."

Dean groaned, casting his eyes up to the rearview again to catch Castiel's eye. "She listens to REO Speedwagon."

"Damn right," said Jo. "Kevin Cronin sings it from the heart."

Dean's gaze was expectant. Castiel wasn't certain why.

"I enjoy all human music," he said.

Dean's response to that was low enough that Castiel suspected he didn't believe anyone could hear it. That was probably well enough -- it cast unnecessary and incorrect suspicion on the birthing status of Jo's mother.

"I think Ellen would be offended by that."

Jo's glare was of the sort known to light particular fires in Hell. "What did you say about my mother?"

No, Castiel decided, they didn't have time for any of this. He leaned over the seat and reached forward to touch both Dean and Jo on the head. As they swept through the ether, Castiel thought he heard the sound of tires squealing.

They were seated at a table in a dark and rustic looking bar, light fluttering deep, blue, and, other than the occasional flash of lightning, faint through wet, dirty windows. Dean and Jo both started, staring around the room and grabbing at the tables and chairs as their minds attempted to catch up on the trip their bodies had just taken. Dean breathed hard through his nose, his jaw clenched and his brows lowered, looking like he would shortly be ill. Jo recovered first.

"I thought I said we weren't ditching my car!"

Castiel tilted his head. "It was too slow. We have things to do."

Dean gasped hard, hands fisting on the edge of the table. "We were in the middle of the road," he said, his throat clenching tight over his voice as though he were being throttled. "There were other cars. With people in them."

Castiel turned his eyes toward the ceiling and cast his mind backwards over the miles. "They are untouched," he said. "The car is in a ditch."

Jo pushed back from the table, swinging her arms up into the air. "You're insane!"

Dean twitched, then glared. "Hey."

Jo rolled her eyes. "Not you."

"Joanna Beth!"

Jo jolted at the sound, and Castiel wondered if she had only just noticed where he had brought them. Dean turned in his chair, staring around. His eyes went wide when he looked to the other side of the bar where Ellen stood, pistol lowered to point at the floor. He froze in his seat, seemingly just drinking in the sight of her, while Ellen appeared to be doing the same to her daughter.

Jo just looked uncomfortable.

"Hey, Mom."

Ellen snapped back to life, crossing the room in what seemed to be far too few steps for a normal human woman. "Don't you 'hey, Mom' me, young lady, where the hell have you been? I've had Ash working his scrawny arms off just trying to track you down!"

Jo spread her feet on the floor and set her hands on her hips, staring back at her mother full of attitude. It was fascinating. Castiel had never seen a parent/child group behave in such an irreverent manner. "I've been busy."

"Busy with what?"

Ellen might have gone on, but Dean chose that moment to push himself out of his chair and wrap his arms around her in a tight hug. Castiel felt the beginnings of a small smile cross his lips -- it wasn't often he got to see Dean interact so lovingly with another person, even his brother. Dean looked like he hadn't seen Ellen in ages. Like the last he'd seen her, he was leaving her to her death.

The smile vanished.

As for Ellen, she froze up at Dean's manhandling, then threw herself into motion. She had Dean detached and sprawled backwards across the table in a moment, her gun pressed to his chest to keep him there. "Who the hell are you?"

"Mom," said Jo. "Stop it."

"What are you doing with my daughter?" asked Ellen, pressing down harder on Dean's chest.

Dean's hands came up, and he gasped out a "sorry" even as Jo grabbed her mom's arm to pull her back.

"Would you just shut up and listen?"

"He attacked me!"

Castiel cleared his throat. "Actually, I believe it was a hug."

Ellen rounded on him. Dean slithered his way off the table and crouched on the floor, arms still raised as though in surrender. Ellen stared at Castiel for a long moment while he looked benignly back, then spun back to Jo. "Go to your room."

"What?" Jo planted her feet again. "No!"

"You two," Ellen said, rounding back and pinning Dean, who'd been slowly rising, with her stare and her aim. "Explain!"

"You can't send me to my room --" Jo started. Dean waved his hands in circles and she cut off.

"Dean Winchester," said Dean. "Ma'am."

Ellen frowned. "Last I heard, Dean Winchester was dead."

Dean blinked three times, apparently momentarily able to do nothing more, then tilted his head towards one shoulder, keeping his hands out and open. "Yeah, well. Rumors of my death and all that." He nodded to the pistol. "Can you put that down now?"

"He's dead?!" Jo stared at Dean, then shook her head sharply. "He's not possessed or a spirit or anything, Mom. I checked."

"Young lady, I am not even close to being done with you." Ellen wasn't taking her eyes off Dean, now, and he was going nearly cross-eyed in his half-crouch trying to stare down the barrel of the pistol. "Now say I believe you're John's boy. Why the hell did you attack me?"

"Hug," corrected Castiel. All three of them glared at him, and he stared back. Dean shook his head minutely, as though unable to believe Castiel's actions, then turned back to Ellen.

"I, uh." He coughed. "I might be kinda psychic."

Castiel frowned. "No," he said. "That's not it."

Once again, three sets of eyes were on him. This time, Castiel stared back at Dean.

"You're not," he said. "You've never shown any signs of your brother's abilities."

The gun shifted aim, this time pointed at Castiel's forehead. He would ignore it, if Ellen didn't seem to be using it to indicate her primary focus of attention.

"And who the hell are you?"

"I am Castiel."

Jo smirked. "He's an angel."

"Pull the other one," said Ellen. "Find out what's on tap."

"Is it bourbon?" Castiel guessed. "I'm still rather certain that eventually had an effect on me, even in relatively small quantities."

By their expressions, his attempt at levity was unappreciated.

*

"I apologize if that was inappropriate." Castiel watched as Ellen lined a series of shot glass up on the bar and began to pour. "I'm still unused to the intricacies of human humor."

Ellen snorted. "So you're an angel, huh?" She set the bottle down and lifted one of the shot glasses to her lips. "And you're tailing after my daughter."

Jo's snort, Castiel noticed, was remarkably similar to her mother's. Castiel lifted one of the shot glasses himself and looked at the liquid consideringly.

"No," he said. "My interest is in Dean." He drank the shot, set it down, and lifted the next one. He went through six shots in succession, watching Ellen's eyes widen a fraction with each lifted glass. He nodded when he set the last one down, then frowned. The alcohol only seemed to burn his vessel's mouth and throat. He would have to drink far more to feel its full effects.

"Me," said Dean. He'd taken up residence several stools away from Castiel at the bar, with Jo and Ellen in between them. "And how do I warrant an angel?"

"You and your brother brought about the end of the world." Ellen didn't seem inclined to drink any further, so Castiel picked up another shot and drank it. "I was the one assigned to ensure that it all went well."

Jo leaned across the bar and took the bottle of bourbon from her mother's hand. Ellen gave her a hard look, and Jo stared back.

"What?" she said. "You weren't doing anything with it." She cast a glance at Dean, then back at Castiel. "If the world's ending, I'm getting drunk."

Dean cleared his throat and frowned, fingers tapping on his own glass, much larger than the shots Ellen had poured. "Yeah, see, I don't remember any of that. And the world's still here."

Thunder rattled the window panes, followed by the roar of rain coming down on the roof like someone had tipped over a bucket of water. Whatever respite they'd been having from the downpour, it seemed to be over.

Castiel straightened on his stool, and wondered when he'd taken a slightly more relaxed stance. The world shifted faintly with him.

Ah. The alcohol was working, then.

"I'm from the future."

Jo spat a small amount of alcohol back into the bottle. Dean set his glass down with a thunk.

"And that's why you think I'm supposed to be with my brother," he said.

"I don't think it," said Castiel. "I know it." He leaned forward to look get a better sight line with Dean, past Jo. "In November of 2005, you went to your brother's apartment in California because your father was missing. The two of you went hunting together."

Jo gestured towards Castiel with her bottle, and he lifted a hand to indicate that he didn't require any more. She didn't move to pour it. "In November of 2005," she said, her tone mimicking his own almost perfectly, "I rescued Dean from a mental institution."

Ellen scowled. "You've been hunting with a mental patient?"

"I thought maybe he was Rick." Jo shrugged, indicating Dean with a tilt of her head. "He wasn't."

Dean finished his own drink in record time. "For the record, there was a demon there," he said. "I was hunting it."

"So that's what we're calling it, now," said Jo.

"Shut up and drink your bourbon," said Dean. Jo seemed cheerful to oblige. Dean stared into his glass. "It tricked me. It won't happen again."

"This," said Castiel, before Jo could begin another tangent, "is the problem." He looked from Jo and her bottle to Dean and his glass. "I sensed that something had gone amiss in the timeline. I returned to 2006 in order to repair it."

Dean huffed softly. "Well, you're right. You really freaking missed."

"Yes," said Castiel. "I believe I have. I should have aimed for whatever moment lead people to believe you were dead."

Ellen had given up on getting the bottle back from Jo, and instead leaned her elbows against the bar. "So why didn't you try again? Go leaping back to November of 2005 or whatever and get things back on track?"

Castiel shook his head. "Time travel is extremely difficult under the best of circumstances. These are not those."

"Dude was out for, like, three days," said Jo. "We thought he was dead."

"You thought he was dead." Dean gestured to Jo with his glass. "You wanted to bury him."

"You were spouting some nonsense about angels. I thought you'd gone crazy on me again."

Dean's lips tightened. "For the last time, I wasn't actually crazy."

"You just keep telling yourself that, hon."

"Children." Ellen smacked her hand down on the bar. Dean and Jo fell silent, and Castiel made a note of her technique. "Are you done?"

Dean and Jo looked to their respective drinks. Castiel cleared his throat.

"Unfortunately," he said, choosing to pretend that the conversation had never been sidetracked, "it is too late to repair the initial breach in the timeline. We must move forward within this one. Once Dean and Sam have been brought together, the disturbance should even out." Thunder rolled again, as though to punctuate his statement. All four of them paused to let it pass, Ellen, Jo, and Dean looking up toward the ceiling as though they could see the source.

"And we'll be back on track," said Dean. Castiel nodded. "To me and Sam ending the world."

"Knew I should've left you by the side of the road," said Jo. Ellen smacked her gently on the wrist.

"Small problem here," Dean said, ignoring the women with little more than a brief look. "Sam's AWOL."

"You mentioned that," said Castiel. "I don't understand. If you did not retrieve him from school, then he should still be there."

Jo shook her head. "Place was totally burned out." She glanced over at Dean. "Seems to be a pattern with you."

Dean's jaw tightened.

Castiel stared. "Sam is dead?" That didn't sound right, even in the context of the altered timeline. He felt he would know.

Dean shook his head hard, his voice deepening. "Hell no. He and his girlfriend skipped town." He lifted his glass, then scowled at it when he remembered it was empty. He held it out to Jo, who rolled her eyes and refilled it.

"With Ruby?"

"Who the hell is Ruby?"

Castiel shook his head. If Dean hadn't encountered the trouble that was Ruby, he wasn't going to bring it up. "Unimportant."

Ellen folded her arms on the bar. "Word is Dean burned, too. I think maybe your daddy was zeroing in on the demon."

Dean's head shot up. "He said for sure it was a demon?"

Ellen sighed. "Only thing I heard from John in years was about you, Dean, and I didn't get much of that. But we get hunters through here and you know how they talk. Word is, John figured it out, went underground to try and keep the demon off any other hunters' tails."

Dean shook his head. "I, uh. No." His brows furrowed, forming a deep line over his nose. "Dad never let us meet many other hunters."

"Your daddy never talked about us?" Ellen's head rocked back slightly. "He wouldn't shut up about you two, to those of us he trusted, anyway." She peered closer at Dean. "Never mentioned you were psychic, though."

Dean look a long drink, his lips twisted downward even around the glass. "That's new," he said, then finished off the glass again. "And we're not talking about it."

"You hugged my mom," said Jo.

"Not," said Dean, setting the glass down firmly, "talking about it." He pushed back from the bar. "I need some air." He strode towards the door without a backwards glance. Castiel watched him go.

"Yes," he said, once Dean had pulled the door shut, hard, behind him. "I believe some air would do me good as well." He turned to leave as well, but was stopped by Jo's hand on his arm.

"Hey, uh. Angels can find people, right?" Her other hand was still fisted around the bourbon bottle, as though it somehow lent her support. Castiel tilted his head, not certain what she was getting at, and she continued. "You think you could give a quick look for my boyfriend? Rick. He's a hunter. I've got some of his stuff, if you need --"

Castiel cast his grace wide as she talked, tracing the emotional connection of her soul to its ends. It took only a moment, and he interrupted her before she could continue further. "I'm sorry."

Ellen let out a soft breath, and Jo let go of his arm, her face crumpling for just a moment before she rolled her shoulders back. "Right. End of the world's probably more important, huh?"

It wasn't what he meant, but Castiel had walked among humans long enough now to get the sense that hearing Rick had moved on from the world would only lead to explosions of anger and disbelief.

"I should get some air," he said instead, and left the bar without walking, leaving the two women behind.

He found himself inches from Dean in the mud and sparse grass that made up the Roadhouse parking lot. Dean hopped back, but seemed somehow unsurprised. He turned his back on Castiel and strode out to the middle of the lot, unmindful of the pouring rain, looking out towards the road. Castiel remained where he was.

"You're not psychic," he said, having to pitch his voice slightly louder than he liked to ensure it'd be heard over the downpour.

Dean's shoulders rose a few degrees. "Then how did I know you'd do that?"

Castiel didn't know. He remained silent.

Dean turned to face him, but didn't approach. Water poured over his face, flattening his hair to his head. Castiel wondered at the wisdom of deciding one needed "air" in such an environment.

"I knew Jo's name before she ever said it." Dean hunched his shoulders against a gust of wind, ducking his chin and wiping water from his eyes. "Last I remember, I was hunting with Dad, then I'm at the hospital and I'm having these dreams -- I've seen them before, Jo and Ellen. I've --" He broke off. When he spoke again, he was practically growling down at the mud. "I've watched them die."

"Where?"

Dean shrugged. "Some hardware store? An empty town. It's kinda. . . ." He waved his hands in the air. "Dreams aren't real specific."

Castiel walked up to Dean to look him in the eye. Dean drew up to his full height at the approach, forcing Castiel to look slightly upwards, but didn't pull away. "Ellen and Jo Harvelle died in a hardware store in Carthage, Missouri, a little more than a year after I came to Earth. They sacrificed themselves so that you and Sam might kill the Devil."

Dean's eyes flicked up towards the Roadhouse, then dropped back down to meet Castiel's. "Yeah? And how'd that work out for them?"

"They were dead."

Dean pointed at the Roadhouse. "They're in there. Right now."

Castiel nodded. "Alive. Because this is the past."

Dean turned with a grunt and walked several feet away, the mud sucking at his feet. "So, what? Someone decided to come along here in 'the past' and make sure the world ends?" When Castiel remained silent, he turned back to face him again. "We killed the Devil, right? Game over, the world goes on, everything is all rainbows and puppies."

"You didn't succeed."

"So you're telling me those two died for nothing."

"Their sacrifice was a noble one. We learned that our methods would not work and we would have to re-plan."

"That's bullshit." Dean wiped at his face, then looked around the lot again. He seemed somehow more fragile than usual, lost, without his brother or his car in the near vicinity. His hands went up to run through his hair, sticking it up again, and Castiel caught a glimpse of fading scars lining both his wrists, some extending up over his fingers. They weren't scars that existed in his timeline.

"That's war," said Castiel. Dean groaned.

"So I am psychic."

"No. You're not."

"You just told me what I dreamed was true. About Ellen and Jo."

"And myself, yes. You knew the rock salt wouldn't affect me even before I told you what I was."

"Yeah," said Dean. "Because I'm a freak."

Castiel tilted his head. "You don't resemble the other members of humanity," he said. "So yes. But you're not psychic."

"Then how did I know any of that?"

Castiel wasn't much given to pacing, finding the expense of energy generally unnecessary, but he followed his vessel's urge to move a few yards away, noting as he did that his steps were less steady than they usually were. He blamed the mud, and the bourbon. "I believe you have somehow tapped into the real timeline. Your memories are imperfect, but they're entirely real." He stopped his pacing with his back to Dean, then turned. "When did you first notice them?"

Dean fidgeted, flexing and straightening the fingers on his right hand, as though easing tension from the scars that stretched there. "I told you, everything was fine, and then I was in the hospital. The demon, ah." He paused, looking down at his hand. He traced the line of the scar over his thumb with his left index finger. "It gave me something. I think it started there."

Castiel peered closer, looking past Dean's physical being to the essence of his soul. There was a darkness there, one that lay over him rather than within him, like a blanket instead of a stain. It fairly stank of familiarity, and he felt something go cold deep inside of him when he finally placed it.

"It gave you its blood."

Dean shrugged, still looking down at his arm. "Yeah." His frown deepened, and he looked up, past Castiel and the Roadhouse, towards the small trees that lined the edge of the property. The lines of his body tensed, and he stepped towards Castiel. "We need to get back inside."

Castiel could guess that this was not a matter of Dean feeling the need to be closer to the women inside. He followed Dean's gaze, his eyes eventually landing on a darker patch between two of the trees. It was difficult to make out through the rain, and the sound of Dean stomping back into the roadhouse hit his ears before he had time to look closely. Castiel stared for a moment longer, then followed Dean in to find him paused in the front entry way.

"That's the other thing," Dean said, his voice almost lower than even Castiel's ears could make out. He gestured in the general direction of the dark spot with his chin. "Someone's after me."

Castiel nodded, then tilted his head. Dean had always said it was an infuriating gesture, but Castiel felt it helped him see things from a slightly more human perspective. Theirs was clearly skewed. "I believe you," he said, thinking of the man with the umbrella he spotted the moment he'd first arrived. "But that," he nodded in the same direction Dean had gestured, "was a bush."

Dean blinked.

"It was a tall bush," Castiel allowed.

"Shit," said Dean. "Maybe I really am going crazy."

 **DEAN**

Hanging around in the Roadhouse meant hanging around more people than Dean had had to deal with at one time since he got out of the hospital, and to be frank, it was making him just a little bit twitchy. The fact that, if he looked just right, he could just about see where the borders of the half-remembered burnt out wreckage of the Roadhouse matched with the present day one wasn't helping.

Castiel had swanned off to go look for Sam or hope or God or whatever it was angels did with themselves when they went off on their own not long after Dean pointed out "the man" who'd been following him since the hospital -- if it even was a man, which Dean wasn't entirely sure of.

Admittedly, he wasn't entirely sure of much, these days.

The things he knew: most of the world thought he was dead. He recognized people he should never have met before. He had a bitch of a time doing much of anything useful with his right hand, these days. Jo wore striped hip-hugger panties to bed, and always turned him down when he got comfortable enough to actually try to get in there with her. Which was okay, because if Ellen ever got wind of him even hitting on her when they were on the road together, he might end up dead for real.

"Hey, new kid!"

Dean's fingers slid on the damp pint glass for the umpteenth time as he tried to line it up underneath the tap. He'd almost had it that time, too, except Mr. Self-Important Hunter apparently got too impatient and the fingers on Dean's right hand had healed up too tight under the scar tissue. He could position the glass with his left hand and bump the tap on with his arm, but something told him that showing that weakness in a bar full up with hunters wasn't the best idea in the world.

Right now, he was just thankful no one had connected him with the supposedly dead guy in the motel halfway across the state. Sticking mostly with Jo over the last few months had spoiled him, and he was discovering that he really hated having to explain all that.

"Pipe down, Walt." Jo, on the other hand, handled herself behind the bar like she'd been born there, which Dean supposed was a distinct possibility. "Ain't like you need the empty calories."

A few of Walt's friends laughed at that one, giving Dean the opening he needed to finally get the glass under the tap and switch it on. It wasn't exactly the most graceful way to pour a beer, but it wasn't like Walt deserved a decent head on it. He was kinda hoping for a glass full of foam.

Jo bumped her shoulder into his. "Hey. You don't have to be back here, you know."

Dean snorted, easing the tap closed. "You kidding? I always dreamed of tending bar."

"Right." Jo rolled her eyes and pulled two bottles of PBR from the cooler under the counter with one hand, then popped them open expertly against the edge. She held them out to him. "You know I can see through you, right?"

Dean gave her a bland look. "Like what you see?"

"Not as much as you wish I did." She pushed the beers into his chest when he didn't take them right away. "Those are for Ash. Back room."

"You trying to get rid of me, Harvelle?"

"Hell yeah. You're slowing us down."

"What can I say?" Dean hooked the two bottles between the fingers of his left hand, then shifted around to squeeze out behind her, making it just a bit of a tighter fit than it needed to be. He leaned his head towards her ear when he was completely behind her. "Sometimes slow can be good."

Jo snickered hard enough she almost spilled Walt's glass-of-head. Dean grinned to himself, then took advantage of the excuse she offered him to beat a hasty retreat.

He used to love bars. He remembered that much. In the alternate timeline right now, he'd be living it up in a place like this one with his brother making prissy faces at his side.

If he ever found out who had royally fucked the timeline, he was going to grind them into powder and throw them onto a bonfire.

He looked around once he made it to the back, wondering just which direction this Ash guy's "back room" might be in. Ellen leaned against the door frame with her phone tucked between her head and shoulder and pointed when she saw him, but otherwise paid him no attention. Dean didn't want to think too hard about why that kind of hurt. He headed for the door labeled "Dr. Badass" and knocked with the back of his fist. The door cracked open, revealing a nose, an eye, half a mullet, and much to Dean's dismay, a nipple.

"What?"

Dean held up the beer. "Special delivery."

The mullet-man grinned. "And enough to share. Come on in."

Trading a bar full of hunters for close quarters with a half-naked dude Dean had just met wasn't exactly what he'd call an upswing, but he was pretty sure if he went back out to the bar proper right now, Jo would roast and eat him. "Uh, sure." He slipped past Ash as the man held the door open a little wider, and soon saw that the too-close-for-comfort entrance had less to do with any touchy-feely crap on Ash's part and more to do with the fact that Ash's back room was apparently a broom closet. "Nice digs."

"Beats dealing with the weekend crowd out there. Grab a seat, man. I'm Ash."

"Yeah." Dean glanced over for a full view of Ash, taking in easy going expression, the mullet, and the calculator watch on his wrist, and he was hit once again by a wave of almost inexplicable grief, though one not nearly as strong this time. He also found himself thinking about Einstein and the Kama Sutra, and decided that whatever he might mysteriously know about this guy would be better off unexamined. "Dean Winchester."

Ash shook his head. "No shit. Ellen told me you were around." He flopped down on a raggedy beanbag chair which took up half the floor space in the room. "You make a habit of this dying and coming back thing?"

Dean swallowed back a bit of near-déjà vu. "Well, all the cool kids are doing it."

Ash pointed at him. "That they are." He reached behind him and pulled out what looked like a laptop with a couple extra circuit boards wired in. "Tell ya what, whatever decided to fake your death didn't do a half-assed job of it."

Dean shrugged, looking around for a spot to sit and finally settling for the floor. "Good enough to fool my dad."

"Like I said." Ash tapped away at the laptop for a few moments. "Been working on this since I sent Jo after you at the loony bin."

"That was you?"

"Who else, man? You know, thirty years ago, there were hunters around who never even laid eyes on a demon? These days it seems you can't turn a corner without tripping over an exorcism." Ash hit a few more buttons, then turned the laptop towards Dean. Dean leaned forward. He worked out that Ash was showing him some sort of database, but that was about it.

"What am I looking at?"

"Possessions, man. Just what I heard about over the Roadhouse grapevine."

Dean skimmed over the information on the screen, his eyes zeroing in on the word "totals", and the number listed beside it. "Hell."

"Exactly."

"Dad never talked much about demons. I always figured there weren't more than a couple cases a year."

"There weren't. Until lately."

Dean looked up from the spreadsheet, meeting Ash's gaze. "How long has this been going on?"

"I can tell you exactly. October 27th. Same day you supposedly bit the dust."

*

It seemed like everything for Dean -- life, family, death, afterlife -- came down somehow to fire. And pain, of course. The two went hand in hand, like blades and pain and torture and sex and Sam and screaming. And screaming. And screaming. And _screaming_ \--

Sometimes, Dean thought he cut them just to try and get them to shut up. There was that moment, just after the odd scrunch-squelch of a soul's throat collapsing, when everything would fall blissfully silent. Just for a moment. Just a split second before the soul remembered that they had no throat and they had no body and they breathed no air and went on screaming, anyway. If he cut them just a little bit more, if he burned them just right, if he said the perfect words while he did it, then maybe Alastair would say what the other demons whispered when he wasn't around -- that Dean was the best there'd been in a long, long time. That Dean had talent. That Dean was an _innovator_.

Alastair never said those things. Alastair never even smiled at him, not since he stepped down from the rack. Alastair adjusted Dean's grip on the knife and pointed out other areas to burn the soul or that his words could be just a little bit sharper and more cruel. No matter what Dean tried, it was never enough for Hell's master torturer. And the hell of it was that Dean never, ever stopped trying.

The current soul was unrestrained, which was new, but it just meant Dean had to pin it with his body. The new soul didn't scream so much as sneer, though it did shy away from him. It begged, sometimes. But Dean, well, he just didn't know where to start. And if he didn't start soon, Alastair would come and Alastair would find out and Alastair would put him back on the rack and eat his eyes and his ears and pull out his tongue and electrify his skin and part of Dean even longed for that, the familiarity of it, though he flinched at how he'd thought he'd been so strong and so right, those years he spent refusing Alastair's kindness. No wonder Alastair never said Dean did well. He was too busy remembering Dean's first thirty years of failure.

The screams stayed distant, as if giving him and his new soul privacy, which was odd. They screamed words, too, words that twisted and weaved around the soul's begging, which was also strange. And then there was a sound -- a new sound -- something like distant thunder and Dean looked up and for a moment, he could swear he saw Heaven. Then something pushed at his left side, twisting him over and back and the unchained soul fled -- it _fled_ and oh, Alastair was going to kill him -- and Dean hit wood and his knees gave out and he gasped, staring across a dark, dingy bar, at a valkyrie holding a shot gun.

The soul -- the -- it was -- Dean closed his eyes, swallowing against vertigo, and fumbled his hands against the floor. The screaming hadn't stopped. The soul yelled, and the valkyrie yelled, and he thought he might know them both, and then another voice spoke too low to be heard. Dean's right hand found the hilt of his knife, but his fingers wouldn't close around it. He pushed at the floor with his bare feet instead, digging himself further into the corner, turning his left side into the wall and thrusting out the badly gripped knife with the other.

"Dean," said the low voice, much, much closer, now. Dean swiped at it with the blade. He felt resistance and knew he'd connected, but the voice didn't seem concerned. Fingers pressed to his head before he had time to flinch away, and Dean gasped again, his eyes coming open.

"Sonuva." He didn't bother to finish the curse. His arms flailed automatically, the knife flinging drops of blood as it arced, and Castiel caught his wrist. "Holy."

"Yes," said Castiel. "You're awake, now."

Dean shivered and focused on his fingers, forcing them to uncurl as much as they could from around the knife. It didn't drop all the way to the floor, but the way it dangled in his grip, he figured the only person he could be really dangerous to was himself.

As though that were even remotely new.

"I'm just saying," Jo said, somewhere over Castiel’s shoulder, "you didn't have to shoot him."

"He had you pinned to the bar with a knife."

"It was totally under control!"

"Like hell it was!"

"Juh," said Dean. "S'n'v." He ordered himself to shut up until his lips, tongue, and breathing seemed to be back under control. It wasn't working very well.

"Okay, fine, it wasn't. You can at least put the gun down now."

Dean whined in the back of his throat as his left side caught up with the world around him and seemed to erupt. He brought his left hand up to press against the pain and discovered he wasn't wearing a shirt.

No shirt. No pants. "N' s'rvice," he mumbled. Castiel leaned closer.

"What was that?"

Oh, and Dean was bleeding, a scattering of wounds low on his left side, above his hip but well below his ribs. His right hand shot out, knife and all, and wrapped itself in the lapels of Castiel's coat. He pulled him closer, leaning into his face. "Ffffuck."

There. That was almost a word.

"I believe he may need medical attention," said Castiel. Because the guy was a freaking genius.

"You're an angel." Dean wasn't actually sure if that was Jo or Ellen, there. The world was going all spinny again, and he couldn't be bothered to tell the difference. "Heal him."

"That's not within my present capabilities."

"Fuck," Dean said again, though this time the word came out less like a heavy breath and more like a squeak. Footsteps scratched over the floor of the bar, and then Jo was leaning in his face, too. He'd've grabbed her, but his hands were already full. Also, Ellen might've shot him again. "Fuck," he told her.

"Uh huh," she said. She tried to bump Castiel out of the way, but only got a faint clang and, by the way her nose wrinkled, a sore shoulder out of the deal. "Move it, wing-boy. Lemme look at him."

"Ah, yes." Castiel moved back as much as he could without dislodging Dean's fingers. His eyes were fixed on Dean's bare chest, and as much as the dreams or future-memories or whatever the hell they were were screaming at Dean to trust him, that fact still made him want to curl in on himself even more.

"Fuck," said Dean, and that wasn't quite what he'd intended to say, so he tried again. "Stop starin'."

No one seemed to be paying him any attention any more.

"Help me lay him out," Jo said, her hand brushing briefly over the side of Dean's head before wandering down to his shoulder to tug him away from the wall. "Mom, can you get some whiskey?"

Ellen grumbled something Dean was pretty sure he didn't want repeated. "Ash, cover him." He spotted her moving over Castiel and Jo's shoulders, headed for the bar, throwing him looks of anger and pity.

In that moment, Dean knew he'd do anything to get her to stop doing that.

"Wha' happ'ned?"

Castiel mimicked Jo's movements, tugging on Dean's right shoulder and pulling him slowly away from the wall. His eyes pulled away from Dean's chest just long enough to flick over to Jo, who smiled faintly at him.

"Sleepwalking. Again. You got just a little bit more active this time." She was all business, guiding him down onto his right side. Castiel's gaze shifted to Dean's left and widened slightly, fixing there.

"S'bad, isn't it," Dean said. He wanted to groan, but was just awake enough to realize that that kind of movement might not be a good idea.

"You kidding? Mom barely winged you."

"Of course I did." Ellen appeared at Jo's shoulder, a bottle of whiskey, a pill bottle, and a pair of tweezers in her hands. "I know how to handle a shot gun."

"You didn't wish to kill him," Castiel said. "That's good. Death makes him irritable."

Ellen and Jo stared sideways at him with identical expressions of disbelief and Dean started to laugh. He had to cut himself off quickly thanks to the way it tugged at his side, but it was a laugh, a real one, something he wasn't sure he'd had in a long-ass time.

Then Jo went at him with the tweezers.

*

"Fuggin' butcher," Dean mumbled, his head tilted forward almost enough to rest it on the table in front of him.

"You're welcome." Jo pushed a pill bottle across the table into his field of vision. "Wimp."

"Let's see you take a chestful of buckshot."

"Please. It was your side. And barely that. Totally a flesh wound."

Dean pulled the quilt Ellen had handed him tighter against his body, feeling the pull of the bandages down his side as he did so. "Yeah, well, flesh wounds hurt." He blinked over at Castiel, who sat on the other side of the table, staring at him as though trying to put together some sort of complex puzzle. "The hell are you doing here? Why don't you go fetch Sam or something?"

Castiel shook his head minutely. "I can't find Sam. I believed at first it was the Enochian symbols that prevented me, but I performed that procedure in 2009."

"Trippy," Ash muttered. He had his arms folded across the shot gun on the table, mostly because Ellen wasn't letting him put it away, yet. Dean's little bout of sleepwalking had her well and truly spooked.

Castiel didn't look much better. "Yes," he said, nodding to Ash, his eyes still fixed on Dean. "Very." He tilted his head. "Dean, when did you get that tattoo?"

Dean glanced down, spotting the tops of a few of the rays of sun on his chest below the blanket. "I know it looks girly," he said. "But it's to keep me from being possessed."

"That should totally be S.O.P. for hunters." Jo was as cheerful as ever, as though bar room surgery was a favorite hobby of hers. "We should spread the word."

"Again, yes," said Castiel. "But the idea didn't occur to Dean and Sam until 2008."

Dean frowned. "The hell are you saying?"

"You have a scar in the shape of a hand print on your left shoulder," said Castiel.

"Yeah, and now everyone here knows it, because I apparently decided to go for a midnight ramble in my shorts."

"That scar is from my hand."

Dean sat up in his chair, his forehead crinkling. "Come again?"

"It is the reminder of the power of Heaven which pulled you forth from Hell."

Dean glanced over at the others, who were all looking at Castiel like he'd grown an extra head. Well, aside from Ash. Ash had his eyes rolled to the ceiling and seemed to be counting something to himself.

"What're you saying here, Cass?"

"We assumed that your knowledge of the alternate timeline was due to psychic dreams brought on by being forcefed demon blood while you were hospitalized." Dean nodded, twiddling his fingers around the edge of the blanket to get Castiel to continue. "I no longer believe that to be the case."

"Communism was a red herring," said Ash. Everyone ignored him.

Dean could see the shape of what Castiel was speaking around in his head, and he blinked hard. "No way."

Castiel nodded solemnly. "Dean Winchester -- the Dean of this timeline -- was in fact killed in a motel fire. You, Dean, are from the future."

It was the sort of statement that Dean had always figured should be followed by a period of stunned silence, as everyone just sort of took it in. And it might have been, anywhere else, if the anywhere else included somewhere that didn't have Ash.

"I knew it!" Ash raised both hands in victory. Jo snorted.

"Oh you did not."

"I did." Ash lowered one hand to point at Jo. "And I'm betting I know just when Dean here crash-landed in oh-five."

Dean leaned back in his chair, sticking his hand out the top of the quilt to rub at the bridge of his nose. "October 27th?"

"First day of your file at El Hospital Loco."

Dean dropped his hand and stared across at Ash. "Say I even remotely believe this. That means the demons skyrocketing. That was me." He glanced down at his wrists. "And these are, what, some sort of self-flagelation?"

"Those are new," said Castiel. "I didn't think it wise to ask."

"Sleepwalking," Dean muttered. "Or the demon. Or." He took a breath. "I don't really know. Woke up in a hallway with my wrists open, holding a piece of glass." He slowly clenched and unclenched his fingers on his right hand, feeling the pressure from the still healing scar. "Guess I knew what I did. Under it all."

Ash tapped on the table. "Hey, man. That wasn't the only jump in demons, remember? First time was thirty years ago. Well. Thirty-three, to be exact."

Dean thought back on his conversation with Ash and frowned. "What happened then?"

Ash shrugged. "How should I know? At the time my mom was still just hoping to meet the band. Anyway, then there's another spike again, 'bout five years later."

Castiel folded his hands on the table. "Those would be the times that we traveled back, previously, Dean."

Dean sighed. "Dude, I don't know if you've noticed, but my memory right now is apparently worth crap. Care to elaborate?"

"We visited late spring, 1973, then returned to 1978. Neither event altered the timeline."

Jo opened her mouth and raised her hand, then pursed her lips. Ellen, who'd been watching everything the way someone watched a bar fight -- or, Dean supposed, a tennis match, but he sure as hell had never seen one of those, let alone seen someone watching one -- rubbed her forehead. "We're all gonna need way more liquor."

"I still don't understand," said Castiel. "There was no noticeable increase in demonic activity when I time traveled previously. And Dean could not have traveled without my assistance."

Dean sighed. His head was starting to hurt, pounding in time with the throb from his side. "You sure you didn't accidentally drag me along with you?"

"Our arrivals were several months apart."

"I'll take that as a 'no', then."

"So, what, then?" Jo crossed her arms over her chest. "We're looking at some other mystery time traveler, who skipped back thirty years? Why? The timeline difference doesn't go back that far, does it?"

Castiel shook his head. "I would have to interview Dean to be certain, but I believe the separation occurred around the time that the Dean of this timeline was killed."

"So Mystery Man was thirty years too early." Dean shrugged. "Maybe he missed. You know, like you did." He frowned. "Wait, if I'm dead in the past -- this present -- whatever -- shouldn't I have, like, blinked out of existence? I mean, yay me, but still."

"No. In traveling back, you've removed yourself from the time stream, as have I."

Dean closed his eyes. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Hell." Ellen put a bottle of whiskey down in front of Dean with a thump. "He lost me at 'angel of the Lord'."

Dean tilted his head back and offered his best apologetic smile. "I really didn't mean to attack Jo in my sleep."

Ellen rolled her eyes. "Shut up and drink, Dean."

"Yes'm."

*

They took a break from their pow-wow for drinking. Dean was tempted to ask for time to put some clothes on, but he knew well enough it'd be a painstaking process, one he was willing to put off for as long as possible. He refused to let Ash or Castiel help him with it, and though he might have said "yes" to Jo helping, Ellen had made it clear enough that that wouldn't be on offer.

He settled, instead, for getting much, much better lubricated before he took another stab at understanding just what had gone down.

"Right, so you're saying we traveled back in time twice before."

Castiel nodded, his expression grave and thoughtful as he picked at the label on a bottle of Jim Beam.

"How the hell do an angel and a hunter go back in time and not change the timeline?"

Castiel looked up. "The first was destiny. You were meant to witness the events leading up to your mother's deal with Azazel --"

"Who is?"

"The demon who killed her."

"And she made a deal with him."

"Yes."

"Tell me you realize how screwed up that is."

"It was destiny."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Okay, so the second time?"

Castiel sighed, and after a moment, took a swig from the bottle. "A rogue fallen angel decided to go back in time and ensure that you and Sam were never born."

Dean shut his eyes, images of beautiful and vengeful women assaulting him, of a man -- his father -- demanding knowledge. "Dad found out about hunting."

"Yes. Then Michael made him forget."

Ash rubbed his chin. "Archangel Michael?"

Castiel nodded. "He erased John and Mary's memories of the entire event to ensure that the timeline was kept intact."

"So this Michael dude." Dean rubbed at his temples. "He just brainwashed Mom and Dad?"

Castiel turned back to Dean. "Yes."

Jo had taken up the seat across from Castiel. She leaned forward. "What about everyone else?"

Castiel frowned. "Else?"

"Like, the rest of the world?"

The frown deepened. "The rest of the world had nothing to do with the situation."

"So you didn't interact with anyone except Dean's parents." Jo tilted her head, disbelief written all over her features. "From what I've seen, you angel guys aren't exactly subtle."

"I suppose," Castiel let the sentence drag out, as though it was pulled from his lips. "Our presence may have been sensed."

"Sensed." Dean closed his eyes again, trying to drag the vague impressions of his previous time travel to the front of his mind. Whatever had swiss-cheesed his brain had done a thorough job of it -- pulling the images forth was kind of like trying to draw a wendigo out of its den. He blinked his eyes open again. "Like by Azazel?"

Castiel contemplated the bottle of booze in his hand silently. Jo ducked her head down and forward and raised her eyebrows. Castiel sighed.

"Yes. I suppose that's possible."

"Okay," said Dean. "I could be wrong -- I really hope I'm wrong -- but I seem to remember telling a demon that I was gonna be the one to kill him."

Castiel looked up sharply. "You told Azazel that?"

Dean sat back. "Maybe?"

"If Azazel thought you were a threat to his plan. . . ." Castiel trailed off and shook his head, then downed the rest of his bottle. "That explains a great deal."

Didn't explain a goddamn thing to Dean, really, and he was about to say so when the door to the bar banged open. He jumped up, the quilt falling to the floor as both hands flailed for a weapon, though Ellen had said flat out that he'd better not be carrying in her bar again. A figure stood silhouetted in the door, its shape so familiar that Dean's heart jackhammered against his ribs. It stepped forward.

"Now what in hell is so important that you dragged me out here in the middle of the damn night to -- Dean?"

The breath rushed out of Dean so quickly he had to sit down again. "Bobby."

The room erupted. Bobby, it seemed, didn't react too well to finding a dead man sitting down to drink with his friends. The same instant he charged forward, Ellen and Jo were already charging back, yelling.

"It's him, Bobby," they said, their voices jumbling together, mother and daughter, until their words were barely intelligible. Wasn't hard to work out the gist, though. "It's him, we tested him, calm down."

Bobby froze about halfway into the bar and stared at Dean. Dean sank lower in his chair and shrugged. "Hi."

"You're dead," Bobby said. "I was there. I helped John out by burning the rest of your remains."

Dean winced. "Yeah. Apparently you did."

Bobby looked around the room, from Dean to Ellen to Jo to Ash. Castiel got a brief frown, but otherwise no real attention. His eyes returned to Dean's and narrowed. "You time travelin' too?"

Dean glanced to Castiel, then back. "Too?"

Castiel twisted in his chair. "How did you know to come here?"

"I called him." Ellen lead Bobby over to the table, pulling a chair from another one nearby and setting it down between Ash and Jo. "Figured we could maybe get a lead on finding Sam."

Bobby nodded slowly. "I could do." He stared at Dean with almost as much intensity as Castiel had, earlier. "Which one you wanna see?"


	4. Book Three

_We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?"  
But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world,   
because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground   
and I see right through the ground. And there is no world.   
And you'll find out._  
\-- Jack Kerouac, "Is There A Beat Generation?" forum (1958)

 **BOOK THREE**

 **SAM**

When Sam reached the Roadhouse, he took a moment to just look the place over. He hadn't seen it after it burned, but he'd heard Dean, Bobby, and Ellen's accounts, and what he'd heard wasn't even remotely pretty.

But here it was, whole and sound. And if he had anything to do with it, it'd stay that way as long as Ellen wanted to keep running it.

He parked the Impala next to Bobby's truck, one of only three vehicles in the lot. The third was likely Ellen's -- he had no idea where the Jeep Dean and Jo had been driving might be, but it wasn't in the lot. As far as he knew, Bobby had no reason to have lied to him on the phone, but the dread that had been lodged in his stomach since he'd found himself on the side of a road on October 27th still weighed on him. He pulled Dean's amulet from under his shirt, running his thumb over its serene face and letting its small weight in his hand center him for a moment before tucking it away again.

He'd been chasing Dean for months. He almost couldn't believe that chase was over.

He stepped through the door, took in the people all seated at the table in the corner, and made a beeline for them. One in particular stood up as he approached, draped in a quilt and looking like he wasn't wearing a whole lot else. Sam didn't care. He walked straight up to his brother and grabbed him into a tight hug.

"Thank god you're alright."

Dean winced into his shoulder. "Almost. Uh, easy on the side, man."

Sam pushed Dean back to his full arm length, not quite ready to let go yet, and looked him over. He could see bandages on Dean's side through the split in the quilt, but even other than that, his brother looked worse for wear. "You gained weight."

Dean snorted. "Yeah, well, you try getting force fed anti-depressants and anti-psychotics for a few weeks and see how quickly you shed the pounds."

Sam pulled him back into a hug, this time carefully avoiding putting pressure on Dean's side. "I'm sorry."

Dean clung back. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Looking for you."

Someone cleared their throat, and when he looked up, Bobby was giving him a knowing look. Ellen and Jo had both averted their eyes, as though to give him and Dean some modicum of privacy. Ash was staring, but it was so good to see him alive -- and not wearing a Mexican wrestler mask -- that Sam didn't care. Castiel looked at Sam expectantly.

"Cass." Sam let Dean go -- reluctantly -- and approached Castiel. Castiel stood, shoulders hunched down like he hoped to avoid any similar affectionate gestures. Not that he needed to worry about that. Sam punched him, not quite throwing his full force into it -- he didn't want to break his hand -- but enough that even an angel might be able to get the message. "Next time you decide to go swanning off back in time, tell us."

"Yeah," muttered Ellen. "He's John's kid, alright."

Sam glanced over to see Bobby tug a bottle of something from Ellen's fingers, then take a swig. "You don't know the half of it."

Castiel frowned, drawing Sam's attention back. "You two were very busy." He tilted his head. "You're not suffering the same side effects that your brother is showing."

Sam shrugged. "Yeah, well, I also didn't get thrown into a mental hospital the moment I touched down." He looked back at his brother. "I'm sorry about that. We were supposed to arrive together. I guess _deus ex machina_ isn't all its cracked up to be."

Dean frowned, easing himself back into his chair and clutching the ridiculous quilt tighter around himself. "What are you talking about?" He shot a glance towards Bobby, who shook his head.

"Don't look at me. Time travel ain't my area of expertise."

Sam grinned, the expression broad enough to make his cheeks hurt. He couldn't help it. After everything they'd been through, seeing Dean sitting there, miserable in a quilt and bandages but looking as petulant and combative as ever was just too good. He pulled the amulet out from under his shirt again, holding it up. "Here. I, uh. Hope you want it back now."

Jo sat up straighter in her chair, lifting her chin to try to get a look at the amulet, then glanced over at Ellen and Bobby. Ellen shrugged, and Bobby waved her off, a "tell you later" sort of gesture. Sam flashed them a shrug, knowing he shouldn't be ignoring them like he was, but as much as he loved them -- and he did, and oh _God_ , he'd missed them -- they weren't Dean.

Dean, who was alive, if not entirely well, and snatching the amulet from him in a possessive gesture that made Sam's heart feel like it was going to rise right out of his chest. Dean looked it over, then closed it in his fist. "The hell, man? How do you have this?"

"Pulled it out of the trash." Sam shrugged. "Good thing I did, too. Wouldn't have been able to do this without it."

Castiel stared at Dean's fist, his eyes narrowed. "And what, exactly, did you do?"

Sam's grin, if possible, grew even wider. "I found Him."

Castiel's eyes widened. Jo and Ellen exchanged a glance. Jo, never one to be left out of a conversation for long, spoke up.

"Found who?"

"God."

Sam expected the statement to linger and gain the weight he thought it deserved, but Castiel had never been very good at letting anyone else get their dramatic moments. "That's impossible," he said. "My father has made it very clear that He is no longer interested in the affairs of man, demon, or angel."

"For the apocalypse, sure. But the entire universe rewriting itself? Kind of a big deal, and definitely not part of His grand plan."

"Plus," Dean said, "this is Sammy. I'm betting he lawyered the hell out of Him." Dean was looking at him with an expression bordering on hero worship. It wasn't a look Sam saw directed at anyone of late, least of all himself, and he basked quietly in the glow of it for as long as possible. Even Jo, Ellen, and Bobby looked suitably impressed.

"Wait, wait." Ash held his hands in the air. "Yeah, okay, God got lawyered and sent you two back in time. Why didn't He just wave His hands in the air and make everything all better?"

Castiel slouched back in his chair and reached for the bottle of Jim Beam Bobby had set in the middle of the table, emptying it of its contents in one long gulp. "Why does my father do anything? He's being 'mysterious'."

Dean blinked at him. "Okay, who taught the angel to do air quotes?"

"Look." Sam put his hands in the air. "Whatever reason God may or may not have had, the upshot is, he sent Dean and I back. Now, if it's okay? I'd kind of like a couple moments with the brother I haven't seen in months."

Ellen nodded. "It's late, anyway. We should all get going on to bed." She gave Sam a sharp look. "Do me a favor and make sure Dean doesn't do any more sleepwalking."

Sam frowned. "Dean's never sleepwalked."

Dean sighed and pushed himself to his feet, keeping the quilt wrapped tightly around him. "Yeah, well, first time for everything."

"Please," said Jo. "It's at least your fifth."

Sam looked back and forth between them, noting Bobby doing the same, and wearing what was probably the same frown. "I don't want to know, do I?"

"Just keep him away from any weapons." Ellen looked over the group. "Only got a couple of spare beds, though. Jo, you're bunking with me. Bobby can take your room. Bobby, you mind sharing with the angel?"

Castiel looked up from his bottle, swaying slightly. "I believe I will be comfortable enough here."

Ellen looked at him, nonplussed. "Whatever. Sam, Dean, you guys have the spare room. Dean can show you."

Dean nodded, already on his way towards the back. Sam smiled sheepishly. "I, uh. Actually already know where it is."

"Right, Future Boy." Dean didn't turn around when he said it, just kept walking towards the back, the quilt just brushing the backs of his bare heels. "Then you can find it yourself while I hit the bathroom."

Sam grinned again. Goddamn, it was good to have his brother even halfway back to normal.

*

"Right," Dean said, as he awkwardly twisted his way into a t-shirt, the quilt now abandoned in a pile on the floor. "So why are we really here?"

Sam frowned, taking in all the various changes on Dean's body from their months apart. He had a few new scars across his back, though nothing to be too concerned about. The ones on his wrists clearly came with a story of their own, one he was determined to drag from his brother sooner rather than later. The bandages on his side were clean, and what with the way Dean was moving, very fresh. And what was with the sleep walking?

Wait, had Dean said something?

"What?"

Dean turned around as he pulled the t-shirt down around his hips, then reached in to pull his amulet out and let it dangle down over his chest, a move clearly so well practiced it was automatic, though it gave Sam that floaty feeling all over again when he saw it. "My brain may be swissed to all hell, Sam, but I know I remember God being a complete asshole. So what'd you do?"

"Like you said, I lawyered him."

"You were pre-law. And you never graduated. And since when would God worry about the law, anyway? He's _God_."

Sam sighed. "Okay, fine, I bullshitted him. Happy now?"

"Ecstatic." Dean stared at him blankly, then reached for his jeans. "No wonder I landed in the loony bin. You probably pissed him off."

"What makes you say that?"

"You piss me off." Dean shrugged, wriggling into his jeans. "So you're here, with the Impala -- I heard her pull up out front. Where do we go now?"

Sam frowned. "Dean, I've been chasing you around the country for months. Can't we just take a moment, here?"

"The world is ending, Sam. Apparently not even in the approved fashion. You telling me we have time for a sleep-over?"

"It's not --" Sam huffed, remembering now how much his brother always irritated him. "I'm just saying we need a breather." He knew better than to say that he thought Dean needed a breather. "Aren't you even curious what I've been doing, all this time?"

"Trying to find me. You just said."

"Yeah, that --"

"Wait a second." Dean looked up, squinting his eyes at Sam and turning his head to look at him askance. "You're the one who's been following me?"

Sam frowned. "I got close once or twice, but never enough to --"

"At the hospital."

"I tracked you down the last day. Jo got there just before I managed to, I got jumped by guards, and the next thing I knew, you two were gone and I was on the run from the cops."

"So that wasn't you in the field."

"Field?"

Dean muttered something about scarecrows. Sam shook his head.

"Look, there were a couple of close calls, okay? I was also --"

"Close calls?" Dean shook his head. "I thought I was losing my mind, Sam. I kept seeing people everywhere we went. Just on the edge of my vision, or hovering near the trees, or just feeling them over my shoulder. And it was you."

Sam privately thought that it was probably a little bit of Dean actually losing his mind, too, but didn't say it. Dean had told him over and over that he was pretty sure he was crazy. Sam had never had much reason to disagree with him, when it came right down to it. Sam didn't worry about it unless something -- grief over their dad, ghost sickness, the pressure from the angels -- was threatening to push Dean over the precipice of functionality. "I should've known you'd notice you were being followed."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Yeah. You should've."

Sam sat down on the edge of the bed. "You weren't the only one I was following, you know."

"Yeah, Jo was there, too."

"No. I mean, yes, but no. I also tried to track down myself."

Dean had one arm raised to sniff at his pit, but stopped and looked over at Sam. "I'm so not interested in your existential crisis."

Sam's jaw tightened. "I'm serious, Dean. You may be dead in this timeline, but the younger me is out there."

Dean nodded. "Yeah. He hit the road with Jess. Jo and I were trying to figure out where they went."

Sam shook his head. "No, not Jess. Ruby."

Dean's eyes widened and his brows pulled together. "The skank-bitch from Hell?"

"Nice, Dean. Very diplomatic."

Dean folded his arms and looked pointedly at Sam. "Am I exaggerating?"

Sam sighed. "Whatever, man. The point is, she's been with him -- me -- for months now. While I -- he -- is grieving for you. You remember what happened last time that happened?"

"Uh." Dean scratched his head. "No. Not really."

"Yeah, well, it's not good. She's had months to manipulate him. The way he could be now, he'd get right on board with Azazel and his master plan."

"You're just cranky 'cause you haven't been able to find him, either."

Sam sighed. "He's not going after any of the hunts we did that year. I tried to wait for him in Lawrence, figuring at least he'd follow the dreams, but by the time I got there, Jenny and her kids had moved out."

Dean rubbed his eyes. "Lawrence? You mean -- Sam tell me Mom's spirit isn't still there."

"I clued Missouri in. She took care of it. Anyway, I figured I'd try the Millers next, right? Remember them?"

Dean stared off into space, a line appearing between his brows. "Nutso psychic kid, killed his family?"

"He was abused."

"Yeah, and he still killed his family."

"Nice, Dean." Sam leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Anyway, I tried to find them so I could corner myself there, but I, uh." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"You uh what?"

"I couldn't remember what town it was."

Dean blinked at him.

"And Miller's kind of a common name."

More blinking.

"Right, fine, I freaking suck at this, okay? Happy?"

"You keep asking me that."

Sam looked pointedly at Dean's wrists. "Maybe I have a reason for that."

Dean glanced down, running his thumb along the scar that ran up his index finger. There was a moment when Sam thought he might even get an explanation, but when Dean looked back up, his face was guarded. "So you're tracking yourself for, what, damage control? I hate to tell you, Sammy, but Jo and I haven't had any luck on that front, either. Hell, even Castiel says he can't find him."

"That'd be Ruby. She's pretty good with the anti-angel charms."

Dean nodded. "So we're stuck, then."

"Not quite." Sam folded his hands, squeezed them together, and then released, only to start the pattern over again. "I think I might know what we have to do. The timeline can't be fixed, not with the original you dead. And we can't go back again without widening the cracks in reality further."

"Cracks?" Dean frowned, then screwed his eyes shut. "Like, literal ones."

"Letting demons and angels and even worse things leak through, yeah."

"Dude, what's worse than demons and angels?"

"If you don't remember, I'm not going to tell you."

Dean nodded slowly, looking faintly relieved. "So all this started when Cass took me back the first time."

"You were supposed to be there, he was right about that. You were destined to be the one to clue Azazel in on Mom. But you're also kind of a wild card."

"Never could toe the line."

"Unless Dad was involved."

"Shut up, bitch."

Sam grinned in spite of the situation. "Jerk."

"So, I, what, told Azazel I was gonna off him and broke the entire universe?"

Sam shook his head quickly. "No. Okay? This is not your fault. That alone wouldn't have done anything. Azazel's kind of full of himself, he'd never expect you to actually be able to do it. But then Anna came back. Word got out, angels were messing with things. Azazel realized this was serious business."

"And realized I was serious business."

"That we both were. He was always pretty sure he wanted me to be his Chosen or whatever, but with angels duking it out over both of us?"

"So he had me offed."

Sam nodded. "The fire at the motel."

"But I'm supposed to be Michael's meat suit for the final showdown."

"Exactly. So the timeline broke even more."

Dean finally eased himself down on the mattress next to Sam. "But." He shook his head. "Dad. He's Michael's vessel, too."

Sam nodded. "If he sells his soul and goes to Hell in this world, he'll break the first seal."

"Alastair said he wouldn't break."

"That was when he had two sons up here he knew were still fighting. With you dead?"

Dean leaned forward, covering his face with his hands. "Fuck. Why is it all around me?"

"Because you're the jackass who couldn't help bragging to a demon that you were going to kill him?"

Dean looked up and glared. "I thought you said it wasn't my fault?"

Sam smirked. Angry Dean was always more effective than hopeless Dean. "Yeah, well, maybe it kind of is."

"Okay, so say Dad makes a deal. He breaks the seal, you go coo coo for Ruby's Cocoa Puffs, and the apocalypse is back on as planned. What about the timeline?"

"It wouldn't be perfect, but the world wouldn't fall apart."

"So we're here to actually start the damn thing?"

Sam shook his head sharply, a smile growing on his face again. "That's the thing. I think I've figured out a way to stop it for good."

*

"This," said Castiel, "Is the stupidest plan you have ever come up with." He gestured to Sam and Dean with the mouth of his bottle, then took a swig. "And you two have come up with some monumentally stupid plans."

Sam glanced over at Dean. His brother leaned his weight against the table, as though it was the only thing holding him up. Dean looked exhausted, more tired than Sam had ever seen him before, even after everything they'd already been through.

If he didn't end this soon, there wouldn't be much left of Dean for him to save.

And when it came down to it, that's what all of this was about. Since Cold Oak, it was all that Sam had been able to think about, and he'd failed again, and again, and again. This was his last chance not to fail. If this didn't work, they might as well all be dead.

"Come on," he said. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"The universe could end." Castiel swayed slightly in his chair. "Every being, living, dead, demonic, angelic, could be obliterated entirely, along with every physical object in the universe, known or unknown. The world could be unmade."

"Right." Dean pressed his forehead into his clasped hands on the table. "So no pressure."

Sam scowled at Castiel. "I don't think I like you when you're drunk."

"No," said Castiel. "Neither do I."

Dean peered at him over his thumbs. "How much have you had now, anyway?"

"Most of the bar." Castiel set his bottle down on the table with a *thunk*. "It takes rather a great deal to get me drunk."

"But you could do it, right?" Sam tried to keep the desperation out of his voice, and suspected he failed. "You can't find the other me because Ruby's blocking you, but you could find Dad."

"Assuming he isn't already dead," Castiel trailed off, his eyes going distant. "Yes."

"Then we have to try."

Dean nodded, pushing himself slowly back to standing. "Us against the universe." He frowned. "Anyone else getting kind of a déjà vu from that idea?"

Sam shook his head. "No, the rest of us actually remember it."

"Hey," said Dean, though his voice lacked its usual vigor. "It's coming back to me."

"Right," said Castiel. "There is no time like the present." He snickered faintly. "And this is no time like that." He reached out both hands to touch the brothers on the head. Sam closed his eyes and braced himself.

"Woah, hey, hold up." Dean's hand landed on Sam's arm, and he opened his eyes to see his brother standing, one arm braced on the table. "We're driving."

Castiel stopped with both hands held up and looked to Sam. Funny, he usually looked to Dean.

Sam reached up to hold Dean's arm against his. "The universe is falling apart as we speak, Dean. We don't have time to drive."

Dean shook his head sharply and Sam tightened his grip. Dean looked like he was about to fall over.

"Yeah, and even if we get this right, it might be my last chance to drive my baby. Ever. And I haven't even _seen_ her in months."

The universe was falling apart around their ears, Dean was supposed to be dead, and he wanted to make sure he got a chance to drive his car.

Right.

"Dean, you can barely even stand up right now. You can't drive your car."

Dean straightened, pulling his arm out of Sam's grip. He tugged his shirt down -- needlessly -- and rolled his shoulders. Sam suspected that, if he had been able to, Dean would have scrapped the whole looking pale thing, too. "I've driven with worse." He glanced over at Castiel. "You'd rather let Mr. 'I don't have a blood stream, I have an alcohol stream' take the wheel?"

Sam looked back at Castiel, who still had his hands in the air and watching them expectantly. He looked at the bottle on the table, then back at the bar, then back at Castiel.

"Okay, point. But I'm driving."

"Sam --"

"Don't argue. You're about to fall over." Sam dug into his pocket and smiled. "Besides, I'm the one who's got the keys."

"I hate you, sometimes."

"Yeah." Sam patted Dean on the shoulder, then started steering him towards the door. Castiel stood to stumble after them. "I know."

*

"She can go faster than this, you know."

"Shut up, Dean. She can not." Well, okay, she could, but it was dark, she hadn't had Dean's master-guru mechanic skills looking after her in months, and they didn't have demons on their tail, so, no. He wasn't going to go any faster.

"You think I don't know my car?"

"In all fairness," Castiel said from the backseat. "There is a great deal that you should know that you seem to have forgotten."

Sam smirked out at the road as Dean looked back over his shoulder. "When the hell are you going to sober up?"

"I'm beginning to think I won't."

"Yeah, well, that's just because you're trashed." Dean turned back towards the road, slouching down in the passenger seat with his arms folded. Sam had to admit, however tired he might have been -- and Sam was exhausted, so who knew what state his injured brother had to be in -- Dean was doing a remarkable job of hiding it. Either that or he'd gotten, like, his five thousandth wind.

"It's also because your plan is idiotic," said Castiel. "I fully expect to die when we get there."

Sam and Dean both ignored him. They drove on in silence for several miles, before Dean spoke up again. He'd never been very good at silence in the car. "You ever wonder if maybe Dad was right, back in that cabin?"

Sam blinked at the road, not daring take his eyes off of it for longer than the briefest of peripheral glances. "What?"

"You know. Way back when. He was all demoned up." Dean leaned a few inches towards Sam. "That really happened, right? I didn't imagine it?"

Sam dared a glance over. "You mean when you nearly died?" He looked back to the road. "The first time, anyway. Well. Second. There was that rawhead thing."

"Oh yeah. Never could look at a taser the same way again."

"Right about what?" Sam regretted bringing the rawhead up. Thinking about that time hurt, what with Roy Le Grange and his choosing Dean for some higher purpose -- and Sam's fervent belief that God was around and active in human life without having to be argued into it. "You keeping the family together?"

Dean snorted. "That doesn't sound like Dad. I mean when he told you to shoot him. He said it then, he said we could end it all, right then and there."

"You wanna know if he was right to ask me to shoot him."

"Azazel would have been dead," Castiel said. "He could not have forced his children to kill each other. You, Sam, wouldn't have died, Dean wouldn't have made his deal, and the world would continue to turn until someone in Hell got close enough to freeing Lucifer again. It's an interesting thought."

Sam flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror. Castiel sat bolt upright, staring forward out the front windshield. "No," he said. "I don't think about that."

"I told you not to do it." Dean's voice had that slightly spacey tone he used whenever he was thinking back, seeing his perceived mistakes in his mind's eye. It was the same tone he used when he told Sam he thought their dad had made a deal for him, the same one from when he confessed to breaking in Hell. Sam hated that tone, equating it to an emotional anvil. You couldn't argue with that tone, no bringing in rationality. That tone meant Dean was at his lowest, and most stubborn. "The world is ending because I told you not to shoot Dad."

"For -- Dean!" Fuck not arguing. Dean didn't get to do this to him, not again. Sam chanced longer and longer glances away from the road at his brother, wishing they had time to pull over and hash this out properly. "The world ending is not your fault!"

"I broke the first seal," Dean pointed out.

"And I broke the last one."

"You thought you were doing the right thing."

"You were tortured for thirty years."

They probably would have gone on, too, except that drunk Castiel apparently wasn't just morose Castiel, but also very impatient Castiel. "The apocalypse is both your faults," he said, raising his voice just enough to be heard over the sounds of the road and Dean's indignant protests. "Now please be quiet. My head is hurting."

It worked, for all of another mile or so. Dean slumped further into his seat, stewing in his own special brand of stubborn misery. Sam drove, eyes glued to the road, jaw aching as he ground his teeth together, searching for the right words to get Dean to understand.

"I didn't not shoot Dad because you told me not to shoot him." Sam glanced over into the passenger seat. Dean aimed his head towards the far corner of the windshield, but he had no hope of not listening. "I didn't shoot Dad because he was Dad."

Dean slowly turned his head back to face Sam. Sam held his gaze, willing Dean to see the truth in them.

Castiel ended the battle before either of the brothers could. "Deer," he said.

Sam looked back at the road, then hit the brakes and the horn just in time to startle the small deer out of the way before they ran it over. Dean smacked at his arm.

"Dude, pull over. I'm fucking driving."

Which was basically Dean for 'I get it', and 'thank you'. At least, Sam hoped it was.

At the next intersection, Sam looked back at the rearview mirror. Castiel nodded towards the right, and Sam made the turn. He frowned at the sign for the local freeway, doing some mental calculations. "You're kidding."

Castiel shook his head, and Dean straightened in his seat. "What?"

"I know where Dad is. I know where we're going to find him."

"Where?"

Sam nodded to the signs. "Lawrence."

**AZAZEL**

The summons was unexpected. Azazel hadn't been summoned in quite some time; possibly ever, if he got right down to it. Even the devoted followers of his lord -- and ohhhh, how amusing mankind could be on that front -- didn't dare try to summon Azazel to them on purpose.

That didn't mean he didn't answer them, on occasion. It wouldn't do to let his name drift too far from the consciousness of man. He had a reputation to maintain.

That was all before. Before he'd found the means to contact his lord, and then the means to release him. Lucifer's reign on Earth was soon to begin, and Azazel would be a key component of that rising. They would speak his name for eons once the process was complete. And the process would be completed. Azazel took steps to ensure that would happen.

He honestly hadn't thought that his little soldier's brother would be much of a threat to his plans, even after he'd told him to his face that he'd bring about his death. Humans were always bragging about one thing or another -- a trait they tended to keep after death and, Azazel would be glad to tell you, that little fact just made Hell all the more infuriating -- and Dean Winchester was surely no exception. No, it wasn't until years later, when a little bird had told him all about the angels coming down to preemptively off his pet project _and_ the older brother that Azazel really started to worry.

Still, it was early in the game yet, and that meant it was easy enough to cross Dean Winchester off the list. A little well placed possession, a little fire -- he loved that element, so raw and unyielding and destructive -- and Dean Winchester was nothing more than a nonentity. And now here was the poor, grieving papa, summoning Azazel straight to him. What could John Winchester possibly be planning?

Well, he was a father, after all. Whatever other shortcomings he might have, John surely placed that little fact above all else. If he wanted a deal, Azazel would deal. He'd bring Dean back -- as incompletely as he could get away with and still follow the letter of the deal -- and in return, oh, in return, John would suffer the fires of Hell and become that which he hunted the hardest.

It was the little things in life that made it all so worthwhile.

Never one to pass up a good entrance, Azazel took a moment to possess a nice, corrupt man a few states away before answering the summons. The man was well on his way to Hell, anyway, so if Azazel didn't get him his body back in one piece, well, he would hardly miss it. He'd have larger worries, by then.

Azazel arrived just outside the dilapidated old hut, assumed a nice, angry expression, and strode in.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded, making a beeline for where John crouched over the symbols he'd drawn on the floor. "You can't be here. I'm calling the police."

John looked up from his crucible slowly, looking Azazel in his vessel's eye. He lifted his right hand from his hip and aimed a gun Azazel hadn't expected to see for at least another few months yet. "How stupid do you think I am?"

Azazel dropped the act and grinned. Men were full of bravado. He'd show this one just what true ego meant. "Do you really want me to answer that?" He raised his hands and waved them through the air. "What exactly are you planning to do with that little pea shooter?"

One side of John's mouth quirked upward. "Don't pretend you don't know what this is, or what it can do."

Oooo, it was exposition time. Well, Azazel supposed he could put up with a little of that, just so long as it got him where he ultimately needed to be. "The Colt. A gun that can kill anything. And aimed right at poor little me. What could I possibly do to avoid this cruel fate?"

"I should have known you'd have a smart mouth."

"You really think you can shoot me with that before I can -- _poof!_ " He waved his hands dramatically in the air. "Zap myself out of here?"

John shook his head. "Been chasing you too long for that. I'm here to make a deal."

Azazel loved being right. It happened so often. "What could you possibly want from me? Oh, wait, let me guess."

"Bring him back."

Azazel snapped his fingers and pointed at John. "There it is. But, sorry, I don't think so. I think maybe I did the world a favor, when I had that little bastard killed."

John cocked the gun. "Don't speak about my son that way."

"Or, what, you'll shoot me? And we're back to the 'I can be gone before you can pull the trigger' thing."

John visibly collected himself, pulling his shoulders straighter and lowering the gun about an inch. "I'm thinking you want this gun more than you want him gone."

"While admittedly Dean's not exactly a threat, I'm a little surprised at you placing a weapon over his worth." Azazel pretended to consider it. "Still, one man's loss is another demon's gain. I could use a weapon like that at my disposal."

"Then we have a deal?"

Azazel grinned. Time to reel him in. "Oh no, John. Not yet. You have to sweeten the pot."

"I don't have anything else you need."

"True. But you do have something I wouldn't mind having."

John lowered the gun further. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't pretend to be base. It's unbecoming." Azazel took a step forward. "Who could I possibly want out of the way more than your dear, sweet eldest boy, hmm?"

John's shoulders dropped. "Fine. Just bring him back and let me see him."

"And now we have a deal." Azazel walked forward again, and John raised the gun. "Ah ah ah. It's not a true deal unless we seal it, Johnny Boy."

John's eyes narrowed. "What, you want me to sign something in blood?"

"Not blood, no. These deals get sealed -- with a kiss." He crossed the rest of the way and stood inches from John, feeling the press of the Colt against his vessel's chest. It was a risky move, but he'd been watching John long enough to figure he could pull it off.

He was right. Oh my, but was he ever right. Just a moment's hesitation and John pressed his lips to Azazel's, firm, unyielding, and awkward as hell, mouth just slightly open as though John thought if he were too chaste Azazel would make him do it again.

He might. It was always fun to watch the mortals squirm.

The door banged open behind him and he drew away. "Just in time."

John looked past Azazel. "Sammy."

Azazel stepped back and opened his arms. Sam took up almost the entire doorway, filling the space with pounds of delightful meat. He'd make a glorious vessel for Lucifer, for certain. "My boy!" He tilted his head. "Now don't look so shocked. Is it because your daddy's swinging for the wrong team?" He smirked. "Or maybe that Daddy's been diddling behind your back at all. Maybe he's even got another kid, tucked away somewhere, living that sweet, sweet life you could only dream -- oof."

Sam had come forward as Azazel spoke, proving that those pounds of meat were pure muscle as he bodily shoved Azazel back against the wall. "What have you done?"

He wasn't looking at Azazel when he said it. His eyes were all for dear old Dad.

"Sammy, I." John had lowered the gun entirely, now, his eyes fixed on Sam, drinking in his Viking-healthy frame. "I'm bringing him back."

Sam's expression fell, exposing a delightful center of gooey angst. "Dad, you didn't."

John nodded slowly. "You need him, son."

"What? What'd he do?" A new shape filled the doorway, but not so completely as Sam had. Azazel blinked, but collected himself before any of the humans could notice.

"Well," he said, as though the carpet hadn't just gotten yanked out from under him. "That's not the girlfriend I was expecting."

Dean Winchester, somehow alive, healthy, and decidedly unsinged, strode into the room. He held a shotgun low and easy at his left side and gave Azazel a brief, angry look. Azazel returned it with a smirk he didn't entirely feel. Dean turned away, fixing his eyes on his father. "Dad."

John's eyes had gone wide, wider than Azazel had seen since the man had been little more than a boy and Azazel had dragged him out of the car to snap his neck like a twig. "Dean." He frowned. "I didn't expect --" He cut off with a shake of his head, then smiled. "Dean."

Okay. Well. The letter of the deal was filled, though Azazel had no idea how, and that bothered him. He hadn't specifically barred anyone from making a deal with Sam, but perhaps he'd overestimated the intelligence of the average demon. He'd have to step up his timetable a bit, perhaps, but Azazel decided this could be workable. He'd chalk this up as a win.

Dean crossed the room in a matter of a few steps, gun all but forgotten at his side. John held his arms down but slightly open, invitation clear.

Dean punched him across the jaw.

Yes, definitely a win. And an entertaining one to watch, too.

"He made a deal," said Sam. "We're just barely too late. He made the freaking deal."

Dean stood nose to nose with his now scowling father. "Really. I'm thinking I should punch him again just for that."

John, the hardass, straightened again. "Not liking this new attitude of yours, son."

"Yeah, well, deal with it." Dean stared for a moment longer, then pulled John into a hard hug.

It was heartening. Really. Azazel thought he might just puke, that's how heartening it was.

John hugged back just as hard, if not harder. "It's been too long, son."

"You don't know the half of it." Dean pulled back. "You deserve about five thousand more punches."

Oh, Azazel was not putting up with any more of this nonsense. "As touching as this little reunion scene is," he said. "John and I have business to attend to." He waved his hand and Dean and John went flying in opposite directions, Dean's shotgun and the Colt hitting the floor as they went. Sam shuddered back several feet, but pulled himself up before he could get close to his own wall.

That was new. And a little bit disturbing. Azazel pretended not to let it get to him. "You've seen him now, Johnny Boy. Time to go."

"Not quite." Sam pushed forward against Azazel's hold. He couldn't pin him to the wall, which said good things in regards to Sam getting in his demonic Wheaties, but he could still press him backwards if he kept concentrating. He'd have to rush things, now, off Daddy Dearest quick, which hadn't been part of the plan. John had been a thorn in his side long enough that Azazel wanted to make him suffer personally. Sam heaved in a breath, lowered his chin, and started chanting. " _Exorcizamus te_ \--"

The boys hadn't shut the door, so the next one to enter didn't get quite the same grand drama as they had, but the individual seemed determined to make it as memorable as possible, anyway.

Of course, he did that just by being who he was. Even Azazel had a bit of trouble keeping his jaw off the floor.

"Sammy," breathed John. "What --?"

"What" was right. Even the Sam in the room stopped his incantation at the sight of him, which, well. Azazel wasn't complaining.

The boy in the doorway didn't have the bulk of the Sam Azazel still mentally pressed against, but what he lacked in pure muscle mass, he more than made up for in expression. This Sam seemed to have a particular brand of tunnel vision, looking right past his double and his not-as-dead-as-advertised brother, looking past even Azazel himself, focusing solely on one John Winchester.

"Dad," he said, his jaw clenched. A small hand wrapped around his bicep and the lithe, slightly dead looking Jessica -- sorry, Ruby -- stepped in after him.

That was much more the entrance Azazel had been expecting. The evening might have been so pleasant -- make a little deal, watch Sam kill his father, sending both of them further along the road to eternal damnation, then lie back and wait for his Lord to rise from the pit. Why did it all have to get so _complicated?_

He was going to kill someone for this. Maybe several someones. Just on principle.

It'd make him feel better.

"Sam," Ruby was saying, and Azazel was pretty sure it wasn't just knowing that she wanted this as much as Sam did that made her sound a little false. "You don't have to do this."

"Oh," said the new Sam, his expression a shade of dark Azazel had been looking forward to since he'd first met the chubby little tot in his crib.. "I think I do."

"Sam," said Dean, pushing against his own wall, eyes fixed on the slimmer version of his brother. "This isn't going like we planned." Azazel slammed him harder against the wall, partly for being alive instead of rotting, but mostly just because he could.

The younger Sam spun around, his eyes going from murder-minded sociopath to wide-eyed little boy in seconds flat. Dammit. "Dean?"

Dean offered Sam a weak grin. "Hiya."

The younger Sam's eyes narrowed. "You're not my brother." Azazel resisted the urge to applaud.

"Son of a bitch," said Dean. The younger Sam turned his glare on the older Sam.

"I don't know who you two are, but you're staying the hell out of this. This is between me and my father."

Azazel probably should have kept quiet. No one below had ever expected much from Ruby, least of all himself, but she'd shown promise in taking the initiative by coming forward and offering her services training Sam. He wasn't always certain of her tactics, but Sam hadn't managed to get himself killed and was now looking at his father like he was something unspeakable that Sam had stepped in, so Azazel should have given her the benefit of the doubt.

He never could resist a good gloat, though.

"That's it, Sammy," he said. "He's the one who took your brother from you. He's the one who took Dean's childhood from him. This is all. His. Fault."

Hey, John had to die. The deal was basically done -- John had seen Dean. All he had to do now was go to Hell. It didn't matter who sent him there.

Sam turned, glaring at Azazel. "You're next." He turned to John and raised his hand. He closed his eyes. John's eyes bulged in their sockets.

Sam was much further along than expected. Good.

"Shit," said Dean, then, for no reason that Azazel could fathom, he said "Cass!"

The older Sam lunged for the doorway, the opposite direction of Azazel's constant hellish push. He couldn't switch directions fast enough to hold him in his place. "Castiel!"

 _Castiel?_

Ruby's eyes went wide. Azazel felt his own do the same.

 _The_ angel _Castiel?_

A wiry man in a trench coat and a bad suit appeared between the younger Sam and John. The Colt shot up off the floor and into his hand.

Dean pressed harder against the force holding him to the wall. "Do it," he said, the sounds pressing out between his teeth.

Azazel should have been replotting. He prided himself for thinking on his feet, though admittedly, he hadn't had a plan go quite this pear-shaped in a long time. But all he could think was _why does an angel need a gun?_

Castiel looked from the gun to Dean. "The universe is too unstable. An alteration of this magnitude could --"

"I don't care," said Dean. "Just do it."

Castiel looked to the older Sam even as Ruby backed hurriedly towards the door. The younger Sam snarled and lunged at him, and what happened next, Azazel could only blame on the so-called angel being, of all things, startled.

He shot Azazel through the chest.

The wound sparked without pain at first, giving Azazel enough time to look down. When the pain hit, it was overwhelming, every torture devised by Hell compounded and then multiplied exponentially. He expected the glorious fire of Heaven itself to overtake him, but the burning had a different flavor, one of wood smoke and granite, dirt and animal sweat. It was the fire of Earth, of humanity itself, standing up to rebel against the creatures who thought to dominate it. He had only a moment longer to think, just long enough for one final thought to flit through his head before the fire overcame him and he sank away into actual oblivion.

They were completely and royally screwed.

Then the world turned white.

**GOD**

God's chambers were perceived very differently depending on who was standing in them. Some saw them as a sumptuous, albeit somewhat medieval throne room. Some saw an abundance of floral life in every shape and size, putting the tropical rainforests of the Amazon to shame. A few had even seen them as the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, of all things. There was never any accounting for taste, but it at least had more dimension and visual interest than those who liked to see Him perched on a shaped stack of clouds. Stories and histories and fashions of humanity had shaped and reshaped His chambers over the millennia until those who weren't God Himself couldn't be certain of what the space had originally looked like.

God knew better, of course. God knew His chambers weren't a space, for one thing. They weren't even a space as defined by sophisticated quantum mechanical theories of space-time. God was beyond space, and beyond time. God was beyond the laws of the universe.

Which, frankly, was the only reason why God was still standing.

It was the Winchesters. It was almost always the Winchesters. On the occasions when He managed to navigate through Cain and Abel without something going upside down and sideways, organize His angelic ranks to get the plagues in order and remember to let Mary know what was up with the whole "surprise! It's a boy!" thing, then set the dominoes up just right for the human race to get past the Black Death and into the Enlightenment and industrialization, He could pretty much count on the Winchesters cropping up to royally screw things over.

There were days when He wondered if maybe Free Will hadn't been such a hot idea, after all. But every time, every time He hit the "reset" button, He just had to stick that concept right back on in there. If He didn't know better, He'd think of Himself as "bloody-minded".

He did, of course. Know better. He was God, after all. The Creator, reigning supreme, all lesser gods should bow before Him or face the wrath of -- well, of the Winchesters, usually armed with pointed sticks.

And you know, He'd kind of liked the Carrigans, human sacrifice and all. They had class, and Edward had made the best peanut brittle.

He was getting sidetracked. He did that, sometimes, when He let Himself do it. He had the whole of Creation to keep track of, after all, and occasionally multiple timelines, to boot. Sometimes even He needed a day or two -- or several thousand -- to rest. Of course, the instant He decided to take a well-earned vacation, someone had to decide it was apocalypse time and then everyone got all excited and wanted Him to join their side.

Speaking of.

"You're probably wondering why you're here."

Castiel blinked at Him. Of all His angels, it had to be this one that survived the obliteration of everything, didn't it? He was as bad as the Winchesters -- who, He'd like to note, were trying to hide behind Castiel, and not doing a very good job of it. Hello, God here!

"Where are we?" He thought that might be Sam. Sam was created to be the one who caught on faster, after all. God had originally thought all the girls would be all over him. He'd been set up to carry the emotional weight of the whole story, after all, and he had that whole gangly puppy thing going for him, but of course, Dean lived to stick a wrench in God's designs, and had gone and got all man-pain-y about his father and his relationship to Sam and going to Hell and everything.

Maybe it was the leather jacket. God thought that perhaps he'd try giving that to Sam, next time. Bring in the danger aspect to him a little sooner. But, no, that wouldn't work. Sam was much too big for the leather jacket. Dean had that whole "kid playing dress up" thing going along with the bad boy image -- the leather jacket worked for him. Still, it all came down to the details, and, well, everyone knew who liked to live there.

"My chambers," said God. "You've been here before."

Dean shook his head. "Yeah, I'm thinking I'd remember this."

God glanced around at the current shape of His surroundings. The presence of less than godly creatures had given the area a limited shape, closing it in with dark paneled walls and filling it up so much with bits and baubles that the whole thing was nearly claustrophobic. Very dark and old world, the walls adorned with masks from every tradition, the shelves covered with framed pictures of major historical events. He looked like an old college archeological professor. Well, at least it wasn't the gilded white panels that Zachariah preferred. That said good things about His guests' state of mind.

"Last time, I believe you expected a garden, so that's what you saw. I let him do the shaping, this time." He gestured to Castiel. "It seemed only fair."

"Sir," said Sam, edging out from behind the still dumb-founded angel. "Uh, your holiness. What -- what are we doing here?"

"You destroyed the universe. This is pretty much the only spot left to be."

Great, now they were all staring at Him.

"Oh, don't give me that look." God picked something up from His desk -- a snowglobe of an island paradise, interesting -- and tossed it from hand to hand. "The universe was doomed from the moment Castiel here decided he could fix a break caused by time travel by traveling through time."

Castiel blinked again. "I meant to --"

"I know what you meant to do." God put the snowglobe down and looked at Sam. "Only reason I let you talk me into sending you two back was to speed things along so we could get started again."

Dean shoved his hands into his pockets -- that leather jacket, he just wore it so casually -- and lowered his head. "Come again?"

"Exactly." God smiled. Castiel actually flinched. Interesting again. "I get to start over from scratch. Again."

Sam frowned. His fingers twitched -- God knew he was just itching to get his hands on some of the books that lined the shelves. There was a copy of everything ever written -- ever -- in here, if you knew where to look, and if anyone could figure out where to look, it was Sam Winchester, boy king and giant nerd. He picked up one about 2012 -- God wondered if He should skip the whole Mayan calender thing, this time, it just seemed to give people ideas -- and flipped past the cover. No matter, it was written in Russian. Sam wouldn't be able to make out much more than the publication date. "How -- how many times have you done this?"

"I haven't really been counting."

"So, you, what?" Dean took the book from Sam's hands, scowled at the Cyrillic script, and tossed it over his shoulder. "Do this for shits and giggles?"

"Dean." Whether Sam was more scandalized by Dean cursing in front of God or by him tossing the book was hard to tell. God was pretty sure even Sam didn't know. "Dude."

God held up a hand. "It's a valid question. I'm doing it for a reason. Each time we get just a little bit closer to getting it right."

"Right."

"You wouldn't believe the mess Mary and John kicked up, before I decided to have Cupid swoop in and pass the buck to the next generation."

Sam paled. "Mom and Dad were --"

"You seem to be stuck on this all being coincidence."

Dean sneered. "Oh, no, we've had plenty of people point out how much of this is very much not coincidental, thanks."

God raised His eyebrows, very nearly something close to maybe being surprised. "So you've worked it all out, then?"

The sneer vanished, replaced by a deep frown. ". . . Shut up."

" _Dean,_ " hissed Sam again.

God shrugged. One of these days, Sam would figure out that He wasn't nearly as touchy as some folks liked to believe. "Let me know what you think when you do. It's all rather ingenious, if I do say so myself." He raised His hand. "Right, then, let's get on with it."

Sam held up his hands, his jaw falling open. "Wait! You mean we're going to remember this?"

God tilted His head. "Of course not. Your brains would explode. Though, Dean, do me a favor?" Dean's eyes went wide, making him look a bit like a rabbit, or one of those little, yappy, nervous dogs. God smiled. "Don't _tell_ the demons you're going to kill them, okay? I don't need any more wrenches in the gears."

"Wait," said Dean. "If I --"

He snapped His fingers, and they were gone, Dean's protest left hanging in the air behind them. Only Castiel remained, still staring at God, his lips -- very close these days to the lips of Jimmy Novak -- drawn up into an asterisk.

"Spit it out, Castiel."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"You know."

"But I want you to ask me."

Castiel nodded gravely. "Why -- why did you leave us?"

"Because I had to."

"But why did you keep talking to Joshua, even after you left?"

"Because He is my Son."

Castiel frowned. "You are my father."

"Yes," said God. "I know."

He snapped His fingers again, and He was alone.


	5. Epilogue

_Maybe that's what life is . . . a wink of the eye and winking stars._  
\-- Jack Kerouac, Letter to Alan Harrington (1949)

 **EPILOGUE**

 **Sam woke after midnight to the sound of someone moving around in his kitchen, and for a moment, for just a moment, he thought it might be his father. That Dean was dead and Jess would die and a demon would steal her body and lead him around the country until he was too angry to see straight and all he could think of was revenge.**

 **Then the moment passed, and he thought _No, it's my brother_ , here to tell him John was missing and Jess would die and they'd roam the country hunting ghosts and demons and fathers until Sam was too angry to see straight and all he could think of was revenge.**

 **Then that next moment passed, and he thought maybe it was a frat boy from next door, drunkenly looking for a place to crash, and he forgot those two previous moments in favor of grabbing his baseball bat and going to see who it was for himself.**

 **When he pinned the intruder to the floor and saw who it was, he spit the name out like a half-curse. "What are you doing here?"**

 **Dean grinned back and patted his shoulder. "Help me up?"**

 **Sam pulled him to his feet, then repeated his question. "What are you doing here?"**

 **There was another moment, just a flicker when Sam knew the answer, and he knew Dean knew it, too, and they could see it, all of it, laid out in front of them, endless as a mid-American two lane blacktop aimed at a flat horizon. Clouds passed from before the moon, illuminating them both in startlingly white light.**

 **Then Jess came out and the clouds came back and the moment ended.**

 **"Dad's on a hunting trip," Dean said, "and he hasn't been home in a few days."**

 **And Sam didn't know how or why, but he knew even as he sent Jess away that whatever happened, he would be leaving with Dean. And this time, if they were very lucky, just maybe they would finally get it right.**

 ****

  
**The End**   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This big bang was brought to you by and of , the lovely ladies who somehow manage to put this challenge together every year, and , the artist crazy enough to jump on board with providing the beautiful graphics scattered throughout. Further support provided by , , , , , and , who provided invaluable assistance and cheerleading through out the first draft and beyond, and by and , who beta-ed and threw in reassurance that, no, this wasn't readable drek, and finally by , who was good enough to even look over various bits of this thing _twice_ , even putting up with "oh gawd, here comes the deadline HOLD MY HAND" mania in the final week. Without any of the above wonderful people, this fic would not be what it is today.
> 
> So! The Mad Road! First thing you should know is that that title is, you guessed it, totally riffed from Jack Kerouac, which admittedly by this point should be obvious, considering he's also the source of the quotes scattered about, as well. Interestingly enough, his works are _not_ among what I consider my major sources of inspiration over the course of the writing of this fic (I shudder to think of what might have happened were I to try to be too Beat), I merely have a deep love for his use of language, especially in regards to short bursts of manic prose. And they fit.
> 
> Shut up.
> 
> Anyway. This fic actually first came into being in my head sometime around when I finished my first big bang back in 2008. At the time it was a simple story about John getting possessed and institutionalizing Dean, and mostly focused on Dean himself and a delightful ~~self-insert~~ OFC nurse's aide who assists him in defeating the evil demons around him. Then, as is only natural with these sorts of things, it started to get complicated. "Why a bunch of demons?" I thought. "Pre-series you'd only really see one at a time. What, is it one demon guy just bouncing from employee to employee? WTF, brain?" and so on. (There was "but, wait, Dean's over 18, he can't be involuntarily committed just on his dad's say so", too, and suddenly it was a court drama as the demons convinced a state judge to keep Dean committed and -- yeah, let's just be glad I didn't go that way, m'kay?) Then I started thinking "but, wait, John just being possessed and committing Dean isn't dramatic enough for John. He should think Dean's dead." And then they killed of Jo and Ellen and I went "THIS IS NOW THE JO AND DEAN BUDDY TRIP HUNTING EXTRAVAGANZA" and it suddenly wasn't even quite about the mental institution any more and I had this whole plan where I was going to have Dean be schizophrenic, so the narrative should be schizophrenic, too, just this side of word-salad, and I started trying to be _clever_ and started rereading _Catch-22_ for hints on how to handle multiple POV changes and time shifts without losing the reader or going batshit nuts myself and then I realized that, holy crap, THAT WAS ACTUALLY A REALLY BAD IDEA, and anyway, Sam wants _his_ part to get told, too, dammit, and I started color coding my POVs to keep track of them and was putting up weekly posts to my beta group going "WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?" and then I realized that I wanted Castiel in it, too, but it was pre-series, and what would Castiel even going to be DOING there? But he wanted IN and he was NEAT and then there was the whole "who is this random stranger I keep having show up? Is he God? Is he the Trickster? Is he even REAL?" and for awhile there was this whole side plot thing about a blend between the soldier who kidnaps death in the old European folktales and Wicked Jack from Appalachian folktales and the angels who refused to choose sides in the original war and I don't even know, okay? And, then, well. Then I realized that the easiest way to make the whole "Dean's dead! No, he's in an institution!" thing work without involving, like, possessed shapeshifters was if he came from the future.
> 
> And when "time travel" becomes your Occam's Razor, you might just be in trouble.
> 
> But that's where my wonderful wonderful giant squad of betas comes in. I LOVE YOU ALL.
> 
> Next year, I'm writing a nice, simple, urban legend fic with no heavenly beings and no world endage. (And then halfway through I'll change my mind and end up with, like, a cyber-cowboy roller derby space opera, or something.)
> 
> Good night, everybody.


End file.
